The story of two historians unleashing evil while recording a song is a strong idea and there are good moments and performances, but it is too chaotic and unfocused to resonate

Paul Duane is the film-maker who in 2011 made Barbaric Genius , a gripping documentary portrait of ex-convict, ex-vagrant and tournament chess player John Healy, whose memoir The Grass Arena is a classic of outsider art literature. Now Duane has given us this horror film which, though it begins with interesting subversive and satirical ideas, and an interesting allusion to Guillermo del Toro, finally becomes, for me, simply too chaotic, strained and unfocused.

Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) are social historians who travel around remote rural pubs in Ireland, recording folk ballads; they become fascinated by rumours of an old woman who lives thereabouts who can sing a thousand-year-old song, taught over generations from mother to daughter, which has never been recorded or transcribed on paper. Asking questions about her makes locals suspicious; Anna and Aleks assure one man that they are not journalists or interested in anything “political”, but he replies darkly: “There’s nothing that’s not political …”

An arts organisation has been seeking out and recording the region’s traditional music and is teaching the lyrics to young singers

In the Jordanian town of Tafilah, a six-year-old boy softly hummed a song. His family were astonished, and his 82-year-old great-grandmother, Jawaher Al Ahmad, overheard and began to cry. She asked the child who had taught him the “ hajini ”, or Bedouin folk song, and said: “The last time I heard that song was at my wedding.”

Her great-grandson, Ahmad, had learned the tune as part of the I’m My Voice project run by Tajalla for Music and Arts, a cultural organisation founded by Russol Al Nasser.

Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s car

The photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut , although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller’s smouldering look to camera, Thompson offers a faintly disturbing grimace. She looks a bit nuts. “Yes,” she nods. “The photographer kept saying: ‘Do that thing that she does’ and I couldn’t. I’d had some banana cake, and I think I was having some kind of sugar rush. I think it’s hilarious. The original cover is so daft, I just thought I’d make it worse.”

It goes without saying that this all runs very contrary to the image of Thompson forged in the 1970s, when she made a string of incredible albums with her then-husband, Richard Thompson. There was something rather stern and austere about the Thompsons even before they gave away all their money and possessions and retreated to a Sufi commune. Their exquisite music was vastly potentiated by Thompson’s voice, a hugely affecting cocktail of fragility and toughness. On their most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight , she sang like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway. Their releases were no one’s idea of a barrel of laughs.

At the Norwegian event, creators from Europe’s only Indigenous nation used kettles, synthpop and recordings of salmon to create music that drew on their often threatened traditions

On stage in a former industrial building in the Norwegian city of Bergen sits a strange, if not bewildering, selection of objects. There is an upright, warp-weighted loom, one of the most ancient and basic forms of human technology, with a weaving in progress on its frame. There is a kettle, a heating element, and an old-fashioned hand-cranked coffee grinder. There is something that looks like a miniature upside-down table – in fact it is a warping board, the structure on which the vertical threads of a future textile are organised before being fitted to the loom. The only real hint that this is the prelude to a concert is the presence of a looper and some microphones, abrupt visitors from the 21st century.

This is the set-up for a new work by composer Elina Waage Mikalson , artist-in-residence and co-programmer of Borealis . Well-established as an annual festival exploring the outer reaches of music and sound, this year’s event has been focused, for the first time, on experimental music made by Sámi artists – creators from Europe’s only Indigenous nation, Sápmi, which spans the modern borders of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula. It is not just a first for the festival. The event also represents the first formal gathering of Sámi experimental musicians: a chance to consider how endangered traditional forms of cultural expression can be enriched and renewed – or, possibly, diluted and imperilled – by innovation.

(Hidden Notes)
This spirited adventure in the avant garde is as experimental as it is accessible, delving into hot-blooded Sirba and Transylvanian epics

Yiddish, klezmer and eastern European traditional music are the energetic inspirations for Fran and Flora’s second album together, their first on Stroud-based new music label Hidden Notes. Cellist Francesca Ter-Berg and violinist Flora Curzon also compose with voices and electronics, and their album’s opening track, Nudity, announces their ambitious intentions. Plucked strings whip up a hot-blooded Sirba (a Romanian/Jewish 6/8 rhythm) against a high violin drone and a skittering vocal of the Meredith Monk school. A delirious, desirous mood ensues.

It’s a strangely accessible record. Wordless harmonies create immediate, even poppy effects on the Nign and Hold Me Close, which should interest fans of shimmery, alternative groups like Blonde Redhead and Stealing Sheep; they’re even Radio 2-friendly on the gorgeous Fishelekh Gefinen – To Catch a Fish, by Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. Layers of sound are built up like a modern dance track before the drums, played by Snapped Ankles’ Ursula Russell, arrive with the heft of a hip-hop break.

American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

(Self-released)
The UK-based French folk singer embellishes her trad leanings with sultry blues and upbeat swing on a poignant and poetic second album

Her 2020 debut, Numberless Dreams , introduced Bristol-based French singer Julie Abbé as an artist steeped in Irish and English folk with a telling way with WB Yeats poems. The album closed with Yeats’s celebrated line: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” Someone has clearly trampled over Abbé’s since. She frames this second outing as “a full cycle of love, celebrating the beauty of what once was, and honouring the different stages of grieving and healing”. It sounds heavy going, yet opener Lanternes d’Or is a slinky blues that evokes a postwar Parisian cafe, brightly sung and artfully accompanied by a small group in which clarinet and guitar shine.

It proves a lodestar for a song cycle in French and English that is by turns sad, sultry and philosophical, its lyrics locating grief, anger and joy in precise but poetic language. Abbé is a tender, expressive singer – on a brace of tracks she dispenses with lyrics to croon and fly wordlessly – while her quartet, led by guitarist and producer James Grunwell, shift easily between folk, swing, jazz and Abbé’s own Poitou bal tradition. She is well known in West Country folk circles, with a place at Glastonbury’s opening ceremony, but this is a lovely reinvention. Formidable !

The acclaimed US indie folk musician talks about escaping from religious cults, working with her ex, and why disconnecting from technology is fundamental to her creative process

In an industry known for its ruthless search for the next big thing, Adrianne Lenker is in it for the long haul. The 32-year-old American musician speaks as though she is in the early stages of a marathon: she is a “craftsperson”, who wrote her first song aged eight, recorded her debut album at 13, and is now in the process of figuring things out. “I still consider myself a beginner,” she says. “I have so many years left to work on writing songs and work on my instrument, and the more refined I get, the more skilled I get.” Certain songs are described as “sturdy”: “I’ll probably be singing this when I’m 60, you know?”

But the pace she is going at is closer to a sprint. Lenker is the lead singer, primary songwriter and guitarist of acclaimed folk rock band Big Thief; their fifth album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You , was a sprawling 20-track release described by the Observer as “wonderful… their most varied and expansive record to date”. She is about to release her fifth solo album, Bright Future , after 2020’s double offering Songs and Instrumentals . In addition, there have been compilations and several EPs put out with her ex-husband and current bandmate Buck Meek (more on which later).

(Cooking Vinyl)
Disquiet pervades the folk singer’s self-written fourth album, with romantic love and awe of nature holding out against ecological collapse

Over the past dozen years, no one has tended the sacred flame of folk song more assiduously than London’s Sam Lee . Singer, promoter , wilderness expert (he trained with Ray Mears), Lee’s principal mission has been “finding new soundworlds for old songs”, many of them learned at the hearths of the travelling community. His third album, 2020’s Old Wow , expanded the musical palette, setting Lee’s rich voice to innovative arrangements by Bernard Butler, the former Suede guitarist turned mature polymath.

songdreaming is more ambitious still. The songs are Lee’s own, their singer cast as a shamanic figure wandering through landscapes hymned in folk song and poetry but now facing ecological collapse. Opener Bushes and Briars begins as a leisurely search for birdsong that is gradually subsumed by a menacing churn of violin, piano, guitar and discordant noise. Numbers that start as languorous, melodic balladry mutate into chasms of space noise or, in the case of Meeting Is a Pleasant Place, thunderous defiance given voice by a trans choir, Trans Voices . Romantic love and awe of nature prove inseparable: “Be soft like green moss, be free,” urges Lee. The record’s dreamlike atmosphere is seductive and disquieting; a moving tribute to Albion’s troubled soul.