Introducing: The Music of Ian Thistlethwaite

As so often, it started with an e-mail from Paul Foster, aka Dementio13, urging me to check out some great music.  I find this a particularly engaging trait of some artists: they're imbued with such honesty and integrity (which invariably comes out in their work) that they happily help me to find other music they suspect I'll enjoy, despite knowing that my shows are always attempts to cram about eight hours of great music into three and therefore running the risk of squeezing themselves out of the playlist.

As it was, I happily found room for a track from Dementio13's new album and something from Ian Thistlethwaite too, whose work it was that I was recommended to seek out.  As usually, my source was trustworthy.  Ian plays a brand of bewitching indie folk that manages to sound both timeless and contemporary.

Around twenty or so years ago, I had a habit of spending part of my summer checking out England's various folk festivals.   On one of these sojourns a member of my cohort sagely opined that to be successful in this area of music you either had to be a startlingly expressive musician or a brilliantly imaginative songwriter: without either of these, folk sounded unremarkable and ordinary.  I felt this was a sound judgement, which is probably why I still remember it today.  It struck me, however, that the really great folk artists had to have both, and Ian Thistlethwaite makes it into this extremely rare category.

His album Mocking Tudors, Not Turtles came out in June and can be purchased as Name-Your-Price from his bandcamp site.  It was this album I was directed to by Paul and from which I play a track in my August Dandelion Radio show.  I've opted for the mesmerising '(Dance Me To) The Mezzanine', partly because it kind of conjurs up memories of watching Blowzabella on a Saturday afternoon in Towerzy, in a performance that was so good it even made me forget to check the footie results (very rare, believe me), but mainly because it has an utterly singular quality that makes you discard such comparisons as soon as you've made them and realise that what you have here is something so magical it rises well above its loose ancient form and stands out very much on its own.

Since then, Ian has put out A Brief Introduction to Ian Thistlethwaite on that same bandcamp site, a compilation that, as the title suggests, collects together various nuggets from his past.  The compilation includes 'Up In The Attic (Yeah, Yeah)', which features samples from Dementio13 and 'Hey! This is Wim Oudijk', which features samples from, guess who?  Yes, Wim Oudijk.  That Ian has teamed up with such wonderful people gives something away in itself, not merely that he keeps very fine musical company but also some indication of how much he's committed to stretching the limits of the form in which he works.

Get the album, listen to the show (which contains much amazing stuff besides the artists mentioned here) and keep up with what Ian's up to on Soundcloud.   Many future delights are anticipated.

Antony Harding - Only Pipe Dreams in the Pipeline

Antony Harding, former drummer with Hefner and individual artist going by the name ANT has, for many years, been involved in musical projects that have maintained a remarkable consistency.  Like his former Hefner band mates Darren Hayman and Jack Hayter, the quality of his individual work has meant that even people like me - and I still include We Love The City in my top twenty albums of the century thus far - have longed ceased to mourn Hefner in favour of delighting instead in the releases of their past members.

So it's probably fitting that I'm playing a track from Antony's new album in my May show on Dandelion Radio, given that the show also features a session from Ramalama Codex & The Universal Unconsciousness, featuring Mike Seed from The Chasms, another much-loved band whose individual members are now helping to mitigate any post-split hangover by striking off in all sorts of interesting musical directions.

Whether the members of that band will ever prove that the parts can match the output of that considerable whole, we'll need to wait and see.  But Harding has long since proved himself to be worth of far more than the title of 'former Hefner drummer'.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I regarded last year's album The Birds Sing Goodnight To You and Me as the best thing released throughout 2012.  When an artist reaches such an incredible high on a single record, I tend to make the rather unreasonable demand on him that he both comes somewhere near repeating the standard as well as taking us in a very new direction.

It's a difficult thing to do, as Gonjasufi and Best Coast bore out last year, both releasing albums that registered barely a murmur on whatever scale might be devised to gauge the impact of a follow-up to a masterpiece.  Harding, however, has sent the needle off the scale: With Only Pipe Dreams in the Pipeline, he manages to astonish and surprise in roughly equal measure and to follow up the apparently unmatchable with something of similar quality.

It's a mini-album, once again released on the We Were Never Being Boring imprint, and it manages to combine the understated brilliance of last year's majestic offering with an audacious sidestep into the realms of the instrumental.  Shedding the lyrical glory of The Birds Sing..., Antony Harding finds himself, musically, naked, armed only with a bunch of acoustic instruments including his mother-in-law's old mandolin.  The mini-album is less than ten minutes in duration, but it loads so much onto its tender frame to leave me checking my watch in genuine expectation that at least half an hour will have elapsed between the mini-epic of 'When The Woodland Path Is Dry Again' and the album's celebratory closer 'Come In Spring and Wipe Your Feet'.

In between, not a single strum of pluck occurs without leaving the listener in breathless anticipation of what's to come next, so that the only realistic response in finding that your lukewarm cup of coffee has outlasted the album's densely packed charms is to put it on again.  Having listened again you realise why he's gone for a purely instrumental collection, because these are tunes which demand to be listened to in their bare, sparse brilliance and to give it words would be not merely unnecessary, but the musical equivalent of adding in too many coloured paints until it all goes brown.

Such a move requires the delicate judgement of an artist with a brilliantly refined ear, and we already knew Harding possessed that attribute.  I'm playing 'When The Woodland Path...' in my May show on Dandelion Radio.  At 2:16 it's the release's longest track and I would hope that those of you who've been responding so well to the Hungarian punk, abrasive electronica and relentless garage guitar barrages I've been shoving your way recently can find a room for this in your hearts.  If not, I reckon it'll do you good to give it a listen anyway.

You can get a copy of this gem of a release at the We Were Never Boring bandcamp site here.  Health warning - don't be fooled by its fragility: it still has the potential to take up a fair chunk of your life.

Us & Them - Walk Light EP

Us & Them are Britt and Anders, a Swedish duo whose work for the much-loved Fruits de Mer label has featured many times in my shows.  Their most recent FdM outing, as part of the excellent Re-Evolution compilation of Hollies covers, contained their version of 'Butterfly', a gorgeous lilting reinterpretation which was, despite some pretty stiff competition, the album's stand out track.

Us & Them are the kind of band who can make a cover version their own, which is why they've fitted the Fruits de Mer roster like a glove.  In their hands 'Butterfly' was transformed from an appealing, if fairly insubstantial little ditty into a melancholy psych-folk explosion.

Now, their EP of self-penned tunes, Walk Light, has reached me.  Released this time on the Ritual Echo label, this small but very substantial collection actually came out back in November but found its way through my letterbox only recently.  The result?   I now no longer see Us & Them as purveyors of some of the most wondrous cover versions I've ever heard, but as some of the most wondrous songs I've ever heard.

If anything, their own stuff is even better.  Only four songs, but each one deserves to be celebrated in its own right.  I didn't think Weston-Super-Mare could inspire anything other than the most feeble sun tan, but Us & them have made it the title of a great song and freed me, at last, from my association of the town with the great ladybird plague of 1976.  Other tracks are equally as fine, but it's when you get to the end of the EP that the goosebumps really start and something unspeakably tender starts running around your head and down your spine.

It's called 'Oblivion' and it's five minutes plus of one of the most beautiful songs I've heard in the last few years.  I'm playing it in my April show on Dandelion Radio, which you can still hear streaming at various times during the rest of the month: it's in there alongside, as usual, a lot of abrasive electronics, Hungarian punk and all sorts of other wonderful things, but in their own gentle way 'Oblivion' and Us & Them can equal the power of any of them.