Radical Traditional: Folk Music for Spring, by Patrick Clarke

Last seen in Radical Traditional via her involvement with the essential compilation of weird new Scottish folk music New Traditions last summer, on a sonic level Isa Gordon’s new solo album picks up where her contribution to that record, a version of ‘The Parting Glass’, left off. Her sound is a unique one, vocals dominating the mix, heavily layered and treated so they take on a rich, melancholy weight. In the air around them, Gordon releases dark concoctions of expertly-produced electronica. Though there is a lot of electro-trad filling the inbox these days, it’s worth noting just how expert a touch she has on this second front – as able a producer as she is folk singer.

Folk compilations have been on Gordon’s mind since New Traditions. She envisages 8Men as a twist on the format, where the boundaries between what is and isn’t a ‘folk song’ collapse. Though the first four tracks are traditional, the second half consists of Richard Thompson, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt and Black Sabbath covers, although there’s no difference in the way Gordon presents them. Instead, they blend into one another, grouped purely by the fact that she, the compiler, happens to find them inspirational.

In Gordon’s view of tradition, it’s not so simple as one song played again and again through time. Rather, she emphasises that it’s the humanity within folk songs, not just the tunes, melodies and words, that can be passed down. In a way, Wyatt’s strange, quasi-mythical ‘Sea Song’ is drawing on the same themes of desire at the core of the centuries-old ‘Love Is Teasing’ that Gordon performs earlier on the record. Reed’s ‘Street Hassle’ quite literally interpolates the Australian Bush ballad ‘Waltzing Matilda’, which in turn can be traced back to myriad different sources. The rage at the core of Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ is not directed against a single war but something deeper in the human core; it’s worth noting that the song’s original title was ‘Walpurgis’, the medieval Christian celebration where Saint Walpurga was invoked to protect against witchcraft (hence the generals compared to witches at black masses). In Geezer Butler’s words: “It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was Evil itself.” So too does Gordon use folksong as a route into these human truths – not just evil, but love, desire, fear and more, presented here in their totality.

As well as poring through reams of faux-pastoral, deeply un-radical folk flotsam that clogs the inbox in search of those worthy of Radical Traditional, another of my jobs at this site is editing our other columnists. Frequently one of them will unearth some staggering stuff that could easily have fitted here, and I’ll seethe that I didn’t get to write about it first. Jennifer Lucy Allan almost always beats me to one punch or another, as she did with last year’s unbelievable Teppana Jänis, featured in her essential Rum Music column, which consists of a duet between early-20^th century wax cylinder recordings from a blind kantele player for whom the record was named, and modern playing by the 21^st century researcher Arja Kastinen and the folk musician Taito Hoffrén. It is an incredible record that captivated all of us at the site, so much so that it ended up at number six in our reissues chart for the whole of that year.

I’m pleased to say that a follow-up, released last month by Death Is Not The End, is just as incredible. This time the archival recordings come from Iivana Mišukka, who died in 1919 just two years after they were made. A tenant farmer whose rheumatism prevented him from doing physical work, forcing him to earn extra money as a travelling performer, Mišukka is given modern accompaniment by Kastinen alone this time around (Hoffrén has since sadly passed away). The kantele itself, a plucked string instrument, produces a sound I find incredibly enchanting, but there’s something else at play here that makes this music profoundly moving – the way that its low volume is so easily obscured by the fuzz of the wax cylinders, and how Kastinen is not just playing along with what ghosts of melody remain, but rescuing and restoring them back to life before your ears.  

My barometer for traditional sound turned into club tracks is whether the result can stand up purely as the latter. Often the introduction of folk instrumentation into dance music serves to water it down, offering a new-but-old-sounding piece of cliche that manages neither the deep cross-temporal communion that I love in folk, nor the immediate transformation of consciousness that I get from my favourite electronic music. On K-Core, Seoul-born, Berlin-based Hwxxng shows us exactly how it should be done. Ostensibly this is techno meets ceremonial Korean music, but rather than try to insert one into the other, or smush them together, it’s clear that the producer has entwined both from the very beginning of the process, using traditional music and electronics as twin foundations on which to build a remarkable record.

On opener, ‘Neo K-Core’, the Samdo Nongak Garak – a traditional percussion suite – isn’t just lifted wholesale, but chopped into fragments, pitch-shifted, reassembled, and then intertwined with a punishing beat that is itself based on rhythmic patterns used for centuries on the janggu drum, then wrapped once more around samples from ceremonial chants. Elsewhere Hwxxng incorporates themes and textures associated with ancient spiritual practises and Korean shamanism, not just for the sonic results, but for the wider questions it sparks. When the ‘old’ can be weaved into hyper-modern music as seamlessly as it is here, where the boundaries between the two are so miniscule as to be invisible, is it perhaps time to stop taking such a linear view of time itself? Will organic and synthetic soon cease to be a distinction at all? As Hwxxng notes, even in a society as hyper-technological as Korea, shamanism still persists.

Henry Birdsey’s collective Old Saw, sometimes referred to (but not by themselves) as ‘ambient Americana’, called time on the project last year with the release of The Wringing Cloth, which was fittingly their fullest and most complete album, one that even bordered at times on traditional song structures. This solo release is anything but straightforward. Released by Blue Tapes as the 57^th in a series of records that focus on the possibilities of minimalism across a wide spread of genres, it sees him present two long-form drones composed for four and two lap steels respectively. Those expecting a meditation on the instrument’s capacity for smooth and dreamy glides will be disappointed. Instead, Birdsey – who is also a working welder and metal fabricator – says he’s using the lap steel as “a channel for working with metal sound sources,” bits of brass, bolts, steel tines and sheet metal. The massive, buzzing swarm of side A’s ‘When The Sweepers Came’, and the dark ebb and flow of side B’s ‘Door To The Middle Room’ are in Birdsey’s words, not the sound of actual lap steel, “but rather the strings transducing, filtering and tuning sound from other objects.” The result is a record that feels strangely detached from its creator, like peering into a parallel world of sentient metals, hearing them commune with one another with all the mysterious, unknowable beauty of whalesong.

The Standing Stones – Jem Finer of The Pogues and Jimmy Cauty of The KLF – first emerged last year with a version of ‘Twa Brothers’, featuring Alasdair Roberts, now followed by ‘Twa Sisters’ with Iona Zajac and Daragh Lynch. Presented in three parts that shift back and forth between eerie detachment and thrusting momentum, Zajac’s vocals flit between the organic and the processed, but are never short of magnetic. Both ‘Twa Sisters’ and ‘Twa Brothers’ are traditional ballads that are simultaneously beautiful and distressingly violent, concerning the murder of one sibling by another – stabbing in the case of the brothers, drowning in that of the sisters. This sinisterness is pushed to the surface by The Standing Stones by the use of audio from news reports describing contemporary events that mirror the circumstances of the songs, a reminder that violence and death are not just the stuff of folklore but of reality, that these narratives are not relics of a less civilised time but reminders of a grim constant truth. At times, as when Zajac’s vocals are reduced to a gasp as found audio recounts the drowning of a woman, it borders on genuinely discomforting. That, however, is exactly the point.

When I first started this column a couple of years ago, Elijah Minnelli’s Perpetual Musket project was one of my main reasons for doing so. To say that that record, where he found the common thread between traditional song and dub reggae, and wrapped it in an invented, surrealist-pastoral mythology centred on loaves of bread and parish councils, is my kind of thing would be an understatement. Last year’s follow-up Clams As A Main Meal was as close to a breakout as an artist this unusual gets, and was similarly excellent, but strayed too far from trad for me to include it here. I’m pleased, then, that new EP Ball & Socket sees a folk influence return via a sumptuous version of ‘Low Country’, perhaps better known as ‘Soldiers Three’ and notably sung by folk rockers Trees in 1971. While Minnelli is a great facilitator for other vocalists (Kiki Hitomi of the great Waqwaq Kingdom appears on the hypnotic dub of ‘Unkind’), the EP also sees him lean into his own singing, a spooky falsetto that I find really appealing.

Those on the London scene will be well-acquainted with Sam Grassie, a key part of the Broadside Hacks collective since the very beginning, a regular at shows in the capital and beyond where he’s consistently dazzling with his blend of fluid fingerpicked guitar and brooding low, dark vocals, and a part of the raucous Les Caravans travelling folk club mentioned elsewhere in this article. A devotee of Bert Jansch’s dark emotion, John Renbourn’s melodic fluidity, and the dynamism of the French-Algerian master Pierre Bensusan, their influence is clear on Grassie’s playing. And yet it’s also a record that feels ‘timeless’ (to use a cliche), the kind that goes beyond trend and deep into the same human melancholy that those great forebears did. There’s also a hint of early Nick Drake, particularly in the interplay with Nathan Pigott’s saxophone and Ula Taylor Reilly’s clarinet on ‘Orchy Falls’, and in the languid beauty of ‘Lighthouse Keeper’ – the only original composition on the record. The rest are all tunes Grassie associates with Scotland, where he was born and raised. The road that took him from there to London has been bumpy – in 2016 he was involved in a serious collision while cycling in Spain that saw him break several bones and puncture a lung. After returning to everyday life too fast, he collapsed, and while recovering lost several close family members and ended a long-term relationship. It was a long time until he was able to start performing again, and a long time after that until he gained the confidence to play solo. And yet, Two Hawks Fly is as assured a debut as you’ll ever hear.

Taking their name from the Kotra river, which flows across the border of Belarus and Lithuania, that region is of particular significance to this trio, whose work is based around research, interpretation and performance of Litvak music from both countries. The Litvak people, 90 percent of whose population were killed in the Holocaust, are Jews who historically resided in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which once encompassed what are now those countries, as well as modern-day Latvia and parts of Poland, Russia and Ukraine; Zialony Haj approaches their community’s music from several directions, blending original compositions based on folk melodies with present-day Litvak music, as well as new interpretations of early 20^th century recordings, all of which are deeply and starkly beautiful.

Peiriant’s Plant is an album of contradictions. For a start, it’s partly a project about the Welsh language that features no discernible words, the two Hay-On-Wye musicians exploring cymraeg via its intonations and natural rhythms rather than its consonants and vowels. The title translates as ‘Children’, although the vegetative impression offered to the saeson among us is a pleasing added layer, whether or not that was the artists’ intention. Its electronics and organic instrumentation, improvised by the duo in the studio, are weaved together so tightly that it skips across the boundaries between the two. Sometimes, one element assumes the qualities of the other – on ‘Pwls’ (Pulse), synths and samples are earthy and roiling while strings are plucked in an alien, skittering staccato. On ‘Wrth Y Bwrdd’ (At The Table), what sounds like the clank of kitchenware and the babbling of the titular plant are distorted into a fractured mirror of the domestic. It is frequently very lovely, evoking the simple joy of family life, but it would also be unfair to categorise the record only as homely; children bring anxiety, too, for what wreckage of a world we’ll leave them to contend with when they come of age. You feel that tension and apprehension on Plant, like on ‘Velfed’(Velvet), where sharp violin and a stark synth line twirl around each other until they are a nauseous vortex as the guitars fray into a howl.

Yet another returning band in this season’s Radical Traditional, Les Caravanes last featured in Spring 2025, with an enjoyable compilation of self-recorded tracks from the musicians who constituted the rolling lineup of what was then a “travelling folk club”. In the year since, the project’s begun to formalise a little, emerging as a band proper who’ve landed on the rugged, chunky folk rock sound heard on this new EP. The lineup, which includes Shovel Dance Collective’s Mataio Austin Dean, virtuoso guitarist Sam Grassie (featured elsewhere in this column), Alfie Jones (grandson of the late Wizz Jones) and more, is not short of pedigree when it comes to the cerebral, conceptual and finely-hewn reaches of the new folk scene. This however – as indicated by the unabashedly Hendrix wah-wah guitar solo that precedes a stomping Dean-led rendition of ‘The Blackleg Miner’ that opens the record – is a looser affair. It’s a little rough around the edges and more straightforward than many of the artists’ other work, but you sense that that’s kind of what they’re going for – a chance for the members to deploy their considerable abilities in less tightly-controlled surroundings and to see what happens. The result is a record that is fetching in its raggedness, frequently very beautiful (as on a hypnotic closing jam with guest Daisy Rickman, ‘Brick Lane Blues’), and as straight-up fun as anything I’ve yet covered in this column.