New Music: October 2024 - Curated by Sharon O'Connell

Yasmin Williams

Acadia

In 1959, guitarist John Fahey founded the record label Takoma, which made him a literal folk hero alongside Robbie Basho, Max Ochs and others. Those fingerstyle players seeded the second generation of so-called “American primitivism”. Muriel Anderson, Vicki Genfan, Kaki King and the UK’s Gwenifer Raymonde – all of whom owe a debt to pioneer Elizabeth Cotten – have since embraced the genre with virtuosic chop and interpretive flair, but 65 years on, it remains overwhelmingly male.

Virginia’s Yasmin Williams is a relatively new name on the scene, winning plaudits for her singular combination of fingerstyle and lap-tapping techniques, and the incorporation of kora and thumb piano into complex, yet effortlessly serene compositions. Acadia is her second label release and a set of (mostly) instrumentals that stretch this genre even further, embracing jazz and pastoral alt-pop with guest turns from King, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and bluegrass fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, among others.

The album’s nine dizzyingly lovely songs brim with delicately braided melodies and countermelodies, often underpinned by insistent rhythms. Highlights are hard to pick, but the celestially soothing ‘Virga’ and ‘Dawning’, which leans lightly on Appalachian tradition and features Aoife O’Donovan, are two. 

Label: Nonesuch 

Craven Faults

Bounds

To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, electronic producer Craven Faults is something of “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Seven years on from his debut EP, his identity remains unknown. We do know that he is old enough to have seen Kraftwerk live in 1976, as a teen, and that he works out of an old textile mill in Yorkshire, where he makes haunting and hypnotic soundscapes evoking the region’s Neolithic landmarks and post-industrial spoilage.  

Bounds is Craven Faults’ third album: 37 minutes of melancholic music made on analogue synths and a vintage organ, that taps Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze, Vangelis and Orbital circa Insides, without being in thrall to any of them. 

He’s a skilled minimalist, conveying his wonder at locales on both a macro (our vast, unknowable universe) and micro (rural North England) scale in compositions of a mostly sombre, always precise nature. The pièce de resistance here is the gorgeously grey and grainy, 18-minute closer, ‘Waste & Demesne’, in which a trombone gently sighs over the simplest, repetitive synth motif, while another strobes insistently, as if in a cosmic disco. 

Label: The Leaf Label 

Shovel Dance Collective

The Shovel Dance

Folk has long been considered more resistant to change than other music forms, being chiefly concerned with preserving traditions rather than transcending them. Increasingly, though, those traditions are being interpreted to boldly innovative effect – in the UK, by a diverse group of artists that includes Richard Dawson, Lankum and Stick In The Wheel. 

Shovel Dance Collective sits somewhere in between these two approaches. In their second album, the nine-piece consider the past while looking to the present. Acoustic-only instruments (25 of them) feature in sublime interplay and with modern arrangements. The songs – some with overtones of drone and doom-metal – may prod at aeons-old collective memory, but they also recognise folk music as an essentially working-class expression that includes queer narratives. It’s a commanding set, musically and emotionally, which doesn’t shrink from darkness: the opening epic is two songs in one and includes an iteration of ‘The Worms Crept Out’, a song about human decomposition that dates from World War One. More harrowing – and thrilling – is closer ‘The Grey Cock’, a traditional that concerns a ghost lover, reworked here with anxiously quivering strings, unsettling drone and a tremulous falsetto of operatic power.

Label: American Dreams

The Hard Quartet

The Hard Quartet

Stephen Malkmus – the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter best known for his work at the helm of influential band Pavement – has described his latest gig as “a hard band consisting of various shredders, players with great pedigree”. In the Hard Quartet, he is joined by three high-profile bandmates: guitarist Emmett Kelly, who leads The Cairo Gang and plays with drummer Jim White as The Double; White, a founding member of instrumental group Dirty Three, and go-to drummer for artists including Bill Callahan, PJ Harvey and Cat Power; and Matt Sweeney, the former Chavez guitarist, who has recorded two albums with Bonnie “Prince” Billy as Superwolf.  

Of course, individual pedigree is no guarantee of great ensemble playing, but the simpático nature of these four and the high standards they each maintain are obvious from the first few minutes of their 15-song debut. 

There’s no wrestling for dominance: rather, their spread of songwriting influences makes for a kind of relaxed vigour, embracing Big Star, Paul McCartney, Velvet Underground, David Crosby and other, more non-specific elements of classic-rock and folk-related history. From the irresistible, slightly glam squall of ‘Chrome Mess’ to the slow-mo eddies of ‘Gripping the Riptide’, The Hard Quartet’s eponymous release is a consummate treat.

Label: Matador Records