Mevrouw Tamara - Leiden Musician Adam 'Finglebone' Varney often sends tips our way and when he does they're always a winner. Take Mevrouw Tamara for example, guitar picking Amsterdam native who makes beautiful simple folk music singing her in home tongue. The Guardian got in touch after she was featured on The Other Woman and made this fantastic video about her as part of their…
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A lot of bands profess to push the boundaries of musicality, to take the conventions of songwriting in new and innovative directions. But let's face it, the format has hardly changed for the last half century. Whether it's electronic or acoustic, dubstep or death metal the line-up changes little with a strong focus upon melody remaining central and the rhythm section relegated to holding everything…
Read MoreSupertalented - Cheesecake is the Best/ Scanner Supertalented is Noa Kurzweil and friends: they make short, weird, lo-fi pop tunes about, well, cheesecake and potatoes and things... Weight Watchers and Plus Size are the two albums she's released on netlabel Birdsong and every song is shorter and sweeter than the next. Their tag line is: "Supertalented are super Lo-Fi for Superpeople." High five! Also, posting…
Read MoreJanine and the Mixtape - Bullets WARNING: THIS WILL GET STUCK IN YOUR HEAD FOR DAYS. It's the voice (take note The Voice TV show fans - this is how it's done) and one hell of a hook. Janine Foster fronts Janine and the Mixtape: she sings, writes the songs, produces, plays synths, sorts out the beats - the works. A New Zealander who has…
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An early broadcast of of Tom Robinson's Evening Sequence from the 6 Music studios - pic comes courtesy of a great 1932 photoset on Flickr tweeted by Jem Stone. Read more on the BBC's 80th Anniversary of Broadcasting House.
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Have you ever heard an album for the very first time that exactly fits the mood you are in? I was lucky enough to have such an album come my way in this last week from those lovely people at Folkwit Records that is so enchanting,beautiful & beguiling it has not been off my stereogram radio-matic ipod ghetto boom box thing ever since it landed.…
Read MoreBy Charlotte Krol Guest blogger & Friend of Freshnet Yesterday BBC Radio 1 released figures from the BPI and Official Charts Company that show a 25% decrease in CD sales from 20.5 million in the first three months of 2011, to 15.3 million this year. Digital sales are instead increasing and account for almost a third of all albums sales. Regardless of the rise…
Read MoreAccording to Wikipedia New York's Anti-Folk movement started in the early 1980s when a booker at Folk City told singer-songwriter Lach that his music was "too punk" for a gig there. Lach started an after-hours club of his own on the Lower East Side called The Fort - and since its opening coincided with the city's Folk Festival, Lach dubbed his event "The New York Antifolk Festival".…
Read MoreShow Of Hands - Steve Knightley and Phil Beer - headline the Royal Albert Hall for the fourth time tonight. Their 21 year career has taken them from playing pub gigs on the South Coast to national and international acclaim - while remaining completely off the radar of the mainstream record industry. In 1997 Steve told me about their unconventional route to success in this…
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The Truth Behind Touring
Five Things I Learnt From Two Months On Tour Three months ago almost to the day I arrived in Oxford carrying nothing but a bass guitar, an amp and a nervous knot in my stomach. It was a sunny August morning and I was on my way to my first practice with a band I've admired for a long time, Spring Offensive (if you don't…
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