The Predatory Wasp
Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara releases her new album London Ko today, exploring Malian blues, folk and r&b and blending traditional West African sounds with contemporary production. The album includes a number of collaborations, including Damon Albarn, Roberto Fonseca, Yemi Alade, M.anifest and this gem from US soul legend Angie Stone.
https://www.normanrecords.com/records/197161-fatoumata-diawara-london-ko
Kate Stables on the prismic, reflective qualities of a Paul Simon classic
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
This Is The Kit is the alias of English musician Kate Stables. Established in 2003, she released her first album Krülle Bol in 2008 and has over four subsequent albums – the latest of which was 2020’s Off Off On for Rough Trade – established a sound deeply rooted in the folk traditions of storytelling, with songs evoking an earthy, tactile sense of time and place one moment and ethereal, dream-like atmospheres the next.
Recently she announced her new album, Careful of your Keepers, due for release 09 June along with the lead single Inside Outside which you can listen to below.
For her One Track Mind selection, Kate has penned some typically poetic words about a favourite track from Paul Simon’s seminal album Graceland.
Rozi Plain’s album Prize came out in January and completely passed me by, despite it being reviewed it various publications I read. She was recently announced for Glastonbury and I’m currently attempting to listen to every act listed: this stopped me in my maniacal tracks. If you like gentle melodies and minimalist, electronic folk that sits somewhere between This Is The Kit and Zero 7, you might well be into this.
I expect some of you are fairly fragile after a long, sunny Bank Holiday weekend of ill-advised excess, so here’s some lovely floaty folk for you courtesy of Kate Stables’ This Is The Kit, who also announced that her new album Careful Of Your Keepers will be coming this June on Rough Trade Records. Feel better?
Crackled radio-like transmissions from Norway’s rural hinterland. Juni Habel’s new album Carvings is “[an] ode to life and death, the beauty of belonging and human kinship with nature.” I Went Out And Sought For Your Name evokes Seven Swans-era, Sufjan – specifically We Won’t Need Legs To Stand – in both its gently picked melodies and subdued, gloriously sorrowful tone.
Lugubrious, meandering alt-pop-meets-folk-meets-americana from the Australian artist who released her new album of the same name via her own Kallista Records imprint last week.
Alice Boman’s new album The Space Between is an extremely relaxing way to start your day. Stripped back and subdued and sitting somewhere between folk and very chilled electronic pop, Bowman has cited Brian Eno, Thom Yorke and Angel Olsen (amongst others) as artists who influenced the LP, which should give you a pretty decent idea of what to expect. Honey actually out a couple of months ago, but it’s the album opener and my favourite, so here it is.
The product of an audio diary kept on a 4 track cassette machine throughout 2019 and 2020, Cork-based musician Elaine Howley’s new album The Distance Between Heart and Mouth is quietly obsessed with memory and nostalgia, painting a sepia-tinted picture across nine richly atmospheric and at times disquieting tracks. Opener and lead single Silent Talk sets the scene perfectly.
https://touchsensitiverecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-distance-between-heart-and-mouth
If there is an artist bio more hopelessly, beautifully melancholic than “I’m not writing the same song over and over so much as writing one long continuous song that will end when I die”, I am yet to read it. Taken from their new LP Their Invisible Hands which lands today, Dead Tree March fully embodies the threads of sorrow and despair which run through the album, with Engel’s mournful strings brought to the fore against a backbone of funereal percussion.
Photo credit: Ilyse Krivel
Fairly fresh from releasing one of 2021’s best albums Ignorance, The Weather Station have just announced a new album, the enigmatically titled How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars alongside lead single Endless Time. Comprising songs written at the same time as Ignorance, it’s safe to expect more heartfelt, contemplative brilliance, “songs that [are] simple, pure; almost naive… that spoke to many of the same questions and realities as Ignorance, but in a more internal, thoughtful way” according to The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman. Sign me up.
The Predatory Wasp 