New Music 2016 - Part 49 - Lady Maisery - Cycle

'Cycle' is released on 28 October 2016 and the third LP from English folk-harmony trio Lady Maisery that comprises Hannah James (piano accordion and foot percussion), Hazel Askew (bells, concertina, harp) and Rowan Rheingans (banjo, fiddle). The first was 'Weave and Spin' in 2011. This is all the more remarkable because all three members are also members of at least one other active group, but that is how folk tends to work.
Lady Maisery records and performs songs and ballads, both old and modern. The name actually derives from an old Anglo-Scottish ballad Lady Maisry (it is Child Ballad 65) and it appears in a new guise on second LP Mayday (2013). The traditional variations are many and varied but the outcome is always far from happy.

The upcoming release will be tremendous musically but to be quite honest I want it on vinyl just for the art nouveau cover alone! It also a cycle of the seasons, which is very appropriate as we head into Autumn because it is in the middle.

Lady Maisery - Cycle (Rootbeat Records, 28 October 2016).

• Sing for the Morning
• Quiet Joys of Brotherhood
• Honest Work
• Season I - The Sun Returns
• Bagpipers/Sheila's 70
• A Father's Lullaby
• Season II - Beautiful Leaves
• So Far
• Diggers' Song
• Eostre
• Order & Chaos
• Land on the Shore

When people try to tell me that things were all far better in some unspecified former time then I'm inclined to treat that with dose of perspective reality. I think that, at least in some ways, music has become more accessible than before. One sense in which that is particularly true is that genres have broken barriers in a way that the old hegemony worked to, if possibly not deliberately so, stifle.