Album Reviews
Nearly a decade after Settlers, Western Skies Motel returns weathered and inward. The real subject of Trails is distance: a Dane's American West, imagined from the North and built in a Copenhagen studio — deserts remembered from films, a landscape loved but never lived in.
Album Reviews
Gareth Dickson has been Vashti Bunyan's guitarist for a decade — but Orwell Court lands on 12k, a label of ambient and microsound. That address is the argument: the Drake–Bunyan lineage run through reverb and delay until it dissolves, closing on a whispered Joy Division cover.
Album Reviews
A still, dusty evening light and an old family house: My Room in the Trees is the Innocence Mission at their most private. Karen Peris's whisper, Don's near-silent guitars, pump organ and the room itself — a hushed folk of domestic memory, and a tender ache for passing time.
Album Reviews
Norwegian, third time out, an hour south of Oslo. The biographical detail counts for little. It counts for more to know that evergreen, in the title, names the memory that won't fade.
Film Reviews
Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven exists for only twenty minutes a day — shot in the magic hour, that sliver of light about to go out. Through mono no aware, Tarkovsky and darshan, it becomes a film about transience itself: beauty in the exact measure it is about to fall.
Album Reviews
On a four-track Tascam, Dagmar Zuniga sends her voice backwards until it becomes the cast of a voice — the negative of something once sung. In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom is hauntological folk in Ghost Box's shadow, where to replay is to misremember, and to misremember is the only faithfulness.
Essays
Edith Holden's The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady is more than a celebrated nature journal. It preserves an entire way of observing landscape, where botany, memory and rural history become inseparable.
Album Reviews
Cate Kennan writes and produces everything herself, and it shows: here, self-production is not a fallback but a poetics — a chosen poverty that leaves the seams visible.
Album Reviews
Five hundred copies pressed, a hundred and fifty sold, then thirty years of silence. Born on a horse-drawn journey to the Hebrides, Just Another Diamond Day is the stone ambient folk was built on: the record where folk stops telling stories and begins to set a scene.
Album Reviews
British folk meets bossa nova — except Liana Flores is British-Brazilian, so the two musics she's said to blend are really one divided inheritance. Flower of the Soul isn't fusion but a single doubled voice: Norfolk and Rio, Nick Drake and João Gilberto, neither one the exotic other.