Radical Traditional: Folk Music for Spring, by Patrick Clarke

Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi are French and Italian respectively, and take their name from a river that was once considered the official border between the two countries – but have become fixtures of Ireland’s traditional scene since meeting in Dublin in 2015, where they bonded over the shared love of the country’s music that had prompted both to make the move there. For a measure of just how much they’ve been embraced since, it’s worth taking stock of the names that feature on this long-in-the-making collaborative record The World That I Knew; Lankum’s Cormac Mac Diarmada and Ian Lynch appear separately across the record, as do John Francis Flynn, Niamh Bury, Junior Brother and many others.

Yes, it’s a who’s who, but that in itself isn’t what makes The World That I Knew so great. Rather, it’s what Varo coax out of their collaborators that counts – the way that Azconaga and Breschi’s own playing and singing interweaves with that of their collaborators. They know when to fall back and provide a platform – as on the genuinely sublime ‘Red Robin’, where Alanna Thornburgh’s harp is let loose to construct a gorgeous melody – and when to move in tandem full-throttle with their guest; regular listeners to Flynn’s solo albums will recognise the haunting tin whistle that opens ‘Green Grows The Laurel’ as something of a calling card, but what follows is an elegant duet, Varo’s vocals, gentle plucks of viola strings and a subtle drive of piano and hammond organ.

Running the gamut from bold a capella (‘Open The Door’, with Anna Mieke) to miniature epics (‘Skibbereen’ with Junior Brother), it’s clear that there have been efforts to corral this diverse selection into a unified whole. It’s telling, for instance, that the record opens with an ode to the power of community and co-operation (‘Lovers And Friends’, with Mac Diarmada and Ruth Clinton), before going on to demonstrate that fact through repeated collaborations, and that it ends in a place of melancholy solitude as they draw to an end (‘Alone’, with Branwen and Slow Moving Clouds). It’s also notable how often themes of Ireland and Irishness arise in the songs’ lyrics – the figure exiled by famine and pining for home on ‘Skibbereen’; Lynch’s call for an “Ireland free from slavery” on his rendition of the radical 19^th century song ‘Sweet Liberty. It might just be due to the Irishness of Varo’s collaborators, but nevertheless it feels notable that a record such as this should be helmed by two immigrants – proof, not that it’s needed, that folk music is at its best when left open to ‘outsiders’.

Originally self-released on Bandcamp a few years ago, now extended with three extra tracks for a new vinyl version by Hive Mind records, Trá Pháidín’s An 424 is as much a work of psychogeography as it is of folk music. There are elements of trad in the instrumentation here – but they’re mixed into a swirl that has as much, if not more, in common with post rock, the absurdist avant garde and spiritual jazz. As I explored in the introductory essay to the last Radical Traditional, however, I consider anything that delves into the relationship between people and their surrounding environment to be well within this column’s realm.

The environment in question here is the 424 bus route in the band’s native Connemara – a coastal area where Irish remains most people’s first language. They cite Tim Robinson, who once walked the entirety of these ragged coastlines, scaled mountains and traversed bogs for an acclaimed trilogy of books exploring the region’s history, culture and folklore, as a spiritual predecessor, whose subject was the same dramatic environment that a 424 passenger will experience from themselves as they gaze absently out of the bus window. As the band themselves put it, “If you are someone who grew up or lives in this region, you have a particular understanding at this stage of how complicated Gaelic psyche is and the kind of spectrum of identity along bóthar Choise Fharraige [the road which the 424 travels down]. With the landscape in mind, this bus journey is a great meditation of the various topics of life.”

A 90-minute epic, this is a record of such depth that any analysis I might offer within the scope of this column – particularly as an outsider – would only scratch the surface. I would, however, like to point out just how utterly brilliant it all sounds – the wheezing of an opening bus door and drums that click like an indicator mingle with languid drifts of brass on opener ‘Cáin Chairr’, before the pace picks up with a magical pump of rhythm – as if our vehicle has suddenly shapeshifted into a magical vessel that’s hurtling toward another dimension. Moving through celestial abstraction, pulsating kosmische grooves and moments of eerie dissociation, their music transforms Connemara into a hallucinatory parallel version of itself, in which we see passengers like ‘fear liatroime’ (Leitrim man), ‘dhuine siúl sa hi-vis’ (‘yer man walking in the hi-vis’) and ‘yung fella’ appear and disappear like phantoms.

In the short film Widdershins & Deosil, squatted among the ferns in a patch of Derbyshire forest, we find Wirral-born musician Ben McElroy carving the primitive-looking head of a marionette from a hunk of wood. Widdershins – as the puppet is called – takes his name from an old word roughly meaning counterclockwise or lefthandwise, a direction that in British superstition was once considered highly unlucky (in the 19th century fairytale Childe Rowland, a girl called Burd Ellen runs widdershins round a church causing her to be imprisoned in Elfland). With that etymology in mind, as McElroy’s Widdershins dangles and stumbles alongside him through the forest, finding a companion named Deosil, and then losing her again, it’s hard not to be left feeling that sense of unease that comes with all the best folk-tales. The beauty of the accompanying music – elegant drones giving way to a shimmering guitar duet between McElroy and Nick Jonah Davis, and then to haunting vocals by the singer Debbie Armour (incidentally a member of a group also called Burd Ellen) – increases that fact through its juxtaposition with the visuals, although the whole thing is left dreamlike enough that concrete meaning is your own to impart.

The music in the film is a condensed version of McElroy’s excellent new album Elkwort – dissonant and beautiful sonic meditations that grew out of improvised pump organ and cello exercises that served a therapeutic purpose – allowing him to “gnaw into deep, old brain feelings,” as he puts it. As well as Davis and Armour, he brings in another guest, Welsh folklorist and multidisciplinary artist Elinor Rowlands, who provides buried spoken word as clarinet, cello, guitar, bass, drums, bodhran and pump organ tangle and knot together like the roots below a forest floor.

While developing her new record Forefowk, Mind Me the musician Quinie took a trip through Argyll in the West Scottish Highlands with her horse, Maisie. The slowness of such a journey, she says in the album’s press material, “opens up a whole new way of moving through the landscape. You pay attention to all your senses, have different conversatins with people and connect to older ways of doing things […] it clears your mind in a unique way.” Though born in Edinburgh, she tells tQ over email that she chose Argyll because it’s where Irish people first settled in Scotland in the 6^th century, a fact that chimed with her own ancestry (she is from a second-generation Irish family). She sings in Scots, meanwhile, thanks to the influence of Scots traveller singer Sheila Stewart, who she first heard singing unaccompanied on the radio in 2015. Despite Quinie’s initial reservations given that she’s not a traveller herself, her deep love of the music, and arguments by traveller friends that a settled person sharing this music might raise wider awareness of it, saw the style become central to her practise. “Scots gives me a way of expressing myself which is connected directly with the landscapes I love. It brings the songs alive,” Quinie continues in the press material.

Listening to the record (Forefowk coming from the Scots for ‘the people who came before,’ or ‘ancestors’) is to hear that tight knot of connections to her surroundings made palpable. It’s in the way her singing emerges with such easy power on unaccompanied numbers like ‘Bonnie Udny’ and ‘Generations Of Change’, and how it weaves so effortlessly into the enveloping drone of pipes on songs like the resonant ‘Col My Love’, the brooding ‘Sae Slight A Thing’ and the frayed ‘Cam A Ye Fair’. It’s in the way her vocals skitter and dance in tandem with fiddle on the delightful ‘Macaphee Turn The Cattle’, over a ramshackle rhythm played on whatever her instrumentalists had to hand – including a cheese grater and a woodburning stove.

Mamer is best-known in the West for his 2009 album Eagle, which drew heavily from the traditional music of the Kazakh community in the autonomous Xinjiang region of China in which he was raised, and was released by Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Dissatisfied with its glossy production and the stereotypical ‘world music’ marketing, however, in the years since Mamer has been delving deeper and deeper into the avant-garde. In December 2021, at the Old Heaven bookstore in Shenzen, he arranged a residency of 14 gigs in 15 days, with ‘themes’ decided on at the last minute and audiences allowed in for free. The gigs were mostly brutal, drawing on the industrial music, drone and harsh noise he’d been exploring in the year’s since Eagle, apart, that is, from night five. Here, he made a U-turn, performing only with a nylon string guitar, and returning in minimal style to the music of his youth. It’s that set that’s captured on Awlaⱪta, the title coming from a Kazakh word that literally means “outside” or “elsewhere”, but that liner notes explain should be taken here to imply “a condition of sustained liminality, a voluntary exile of being a stranger in a strange land.”

Taking in everthing from a sprawling and warm rendition of ‘Love’, a 90s ballad by the Kazakhstani rock group Roksonaki which Mamer would have heard over the radio as a boy, to an ancient piece said to have been composed on the sıbızğı flute by the mythological Turkic hero Korkut Ata – presented here as a minimalist epic – to an elegant composition by the early 20^th century master of the dombra, as well as original works, Awlakta could easily be viewed as a ‘back to the roots’ performance. And yet, it still feels in line with Mamer’s wider experimental practise. His sparkling, shimmering guitar-playing turns his old source material into something properly transcendent, in the same way Robbie Basho’s did with American Primitive, or Carlos Paredes’ with Portuguese Fado. At least that’s true for five of the six tracks. For the closer, ‘Jupiter Project’, as if to make a point, we hear Mamer suddenly grab an unused guitar pickup and press it to his throat, his howls twisted through guitar pedals to make a sound that’s half air-raid siren, half late 60s electronic noise experiment. Here, the veil is lifted to reveal the dark, psychedelic monster that lay beneath all along.

Joy Moughanni began his debut album A Separation From Habit in October last year, the same month that, having already waged an aerial bombing campaign and overseen the detonation of explosives hidden in electronic devices, Israel launched a ground invasion his native Lebanon, killing thousands of people – mostly civilians. I’ve written a lot in prior editions of this column about music that helps the listener make sense of societal fracture in its aftermath, but here we find a record created within that fracture, not seeking healing or closure, but dwelling unflinchingly on a present defined by rage, devastation, and grief.

Opener ‘The Voice I’ve Yet To Understand’ is the clearest exploration of the record’s central tenet – how the discomfort of the present finds tragic echoes through time. Here, traditional zajal poetry evokes the communal past, archival radio debates from the 1970s and 80s summons living memory, while Moughanni’s unsettling production places us firmly in the present. On a later interlude we hear the sounds of real bombs dropped during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, while ‘Of Colour And Significance’ elicits the region’s even older colonial scars via the use of a French cassette called Lebanon In Colour. That original tape had featured romanticised melodies played on the qanun (a Middle Eastern string instrument), which here Moughanni stretches and warps into something simmering with rage. It ends, however, in a place that is in a way even more heartbreaking – the 14-minute ambient sprawl ‘To Lose A Friend / A Separation From Habit’ evoking the detachment and suppression necessary to simply keep existing under such conditions.

Sevdah, or Sevdalinka, a traditional form of Bosnian music, makes a good example of the way folksong exists at the intersection of many wider influences. Though its specific history is unclear, the style is known to date back at least as far as the arrival of the Ottomans in the medieval period, while also hinting at earlier Sephardic and Andalusian influences, and has evolved over the centuries through various melodic and instrumental imports from both East and West. After the Bosnian war left many in the country pining for a way to connect to a time before the devastation, the genre began a renaissance that continues today, with a host of musicians from Bosnia and beyond exploring new possibilities from the slow, sprawling, emotionally intense melodies that are the style’s defining traits. Croatian vocalist Vesna Pisarović is one such artist, who on Poravna explores a combination of beautifully sombre Sevdah singing with semi-improvised experimental jazz jams on guitar, drums, double bass and trumpet. It’s quite the about-turn for the singer, best-known in her homeland as a platinum-selling pop star and former Eurovision entrant, but then that’s just one more layer to the fascinating stack of juxtapositions that defines this album – her singing remaining consistent in its assured beauty as the instrumentals ebb and flow in their intensity.

The new record by Joshua Arnold and Therine is centred around songs from the British Isles that explore ‘the dark and macabre’. It is, given folk songs’ abundance of darkness, macabreness, violence, madness and general skullduggery, quite the well to draw from. In fact, the North West duo’s biggest hurdle here is setting themselves apart amid the scene’s current slew of hulking doom folk. It’s something they manage deftly by taking a more minimalist approach than their contemporaries, allowing the horror of these songs to be delivered raw and unvarnished and in doing so extracting even more of their essence than most others manage. Therine’s vocals are just that tiny bit off-kilter, giving them that extra cutting edge. Backing comes from Arnold’s guitar, cello, mandolin, dulcimer, harmonium, banjo, glockenspiel, hurdy-gurdy and more, but crucially only a handful of instruments at a time. ‘Death And The Lady’ sets the tale of a maid’s futile attempts to bribe Death with her finery in exchange for a few more days of life to simply guitar and an eerie whistle. ‘Boys Of Bedlam’, so often turned into a high-tempo romp by musicians who take the fantastical imagery of its lunatic narrator (“My staff has murdered giants”), is here presented instead as a sombre meditation on madness – the very real menace that lies behind those fantasies (cutting mince pies from children’s thighs, and so on) allowed to bubble up to the surface. Points where Therine sings entirely unaccompanied (‘Lyke Wake Dirge’, ‘Maid’s Lament’) are more affecting still.

In 1939, among the treasures unearthed from the Sutton Hoo ship burial were fragments of a 7th century lyre, thought to have belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king. Now, albeit via a replica, that instrument has found its way into the hands of one of Britain’s foremost explorers of the intersection between early and experimental musics, Laura Cannell. On her 11^th album LYRELYRELYRE the instrument’s chimes are interwoven with bass recorders and double reeded crumhorn, as well as with Cannell’s deep research into the lyre’s role in pre-Christian England, to form something totally mesmeric. As Cannell herself has noted, of all the artefacts unearthed in Sutton Hoo and beyond, it’s the lyre’s unique ability to stimulate our aural senses that makes it that much more visceral as a link back to the past. “A physicality and a sound, a language and a feeling that enables us to truly feel connected to our predecessors when we strike the strings,” as she puts it. And indeed, listening to the chasmic reverberations on LYRELYRELYRE, it’s easy to imagine them echoing all the way back to the seventh century and beyond.

Those seeking an easy introduction to the emergent scene of exciting young British folk musicians could do a lot worse than this compilation of work by members of Les Caravanes, a “travelling folk club” of ever shifting makeup. They take their name from the legendary Soho venue Les Cousins that was central to the 1960s scene and aim, as they put it, “to carry on [its] legacy”, and are composed of members who mostly met through a present-day club, Broadside Hacks, that I genuinely believe will one day be looked back upon with equal reverence. This compilation is acoustic guitar-heavy in its opening third, featuring (among others) a dazzling turn from central figure Sam Grassie on ‘Kishor’s’, and further evidence (following our conversation on the topic for last Autumn’s Radical Traditional) that Daisy Rickman’s voice is almost as well-suited to Nick Drake songs as Drake himself. The album broadens in scope as it progresses, however, encompassing the acrobatic harp-and-vocals brilliance of Polish-born Aga Ujma on ‘Na Polu Sosna Stojala’, unaccompanied turns from Shovel Dance’s Mataio Austin Dean on a rugged ‘John Barleycorn’ and Lileth Chinn on a tender ‘Mountain Streams’, a clàrsach and flute duet from Anna McLuckie and Gail Tasker on ‘Sleeping Tune’, Goblin Band’s Sonny Brazil on accordion for ‘Sherborne Waltz’, a delightful closing collective rendition of Wizz Jones’ ‘When I Leave Berlin’ (particularly poignant given Jones’ death last month) and more. As a document of a scene still in its exciting infancy, this compilation is essential – more so given that all proceeds are being donated to MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station).