New Music 2015 - Part 71 - Ange Hardy - Esteesee

This is the first of a pair that I prefigured here earlier this week. It is my first response to a variety of informal discussions, at festivals and elsewhere, about an apparent division in modern UK folk music.
I'm not going to make judgements for I will take as much time as is needed to assess both sides of the coin. This is not fence-sitting, for I like both for their respective virtues.
There are two fairly distinct kinds of tradition, in interpretation, and this represents one of them.

The title, pronounced as written, refers specifically to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 -1834).

This comprises new music on the theme of old words. In that sense it is the academic side of modern folk and I suspect that there are some that would say that this is not what folk music should be about. I beg to differ about that.
The nub of this lies with a conundrum that is at the heart of contemporary folk and one to which I have no answer and believe there is none to be found: does it reflect and seek solace in the values of the current time with regard to times past or attempt the mirror image of that situation, or indeed both?

It is without doubt a very fine album indeed. 

Hada de las flores

As we seem to be much involved with song lyrics here is another, except that it is a poem by Peruvian José María Eguren (1874 - 1942).

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, which is hardly something that would have happened otherwise and it is some time since I have indulged in foreign language lyrics. I'm not sure how or why we ended up here but then that is part of the pleasure of writing a blog.

You have to believe it, as I do, because if it were any other way I'd have quit after the first few posts just like I thought I would!

LA NIÑA DE LA LÁMPARA AZUL

En el pasadizo nebuloso
cual mágico sueño de Estambul,
su perfil presenta destelloso
la niña de la lámpara azul.

Ágil y risueña se insinúa,
y su llama seductora brilla,
tiembla en su cabello la garúa
de la playa de la maravilla.

Con voz infantil y melodiosa
en fresco aroma de abedul,
habla de una vida milagrosa
la niña de la lámpara azul.

Con cálidos ojos de dulzura
y besos de amor matutino,
me ofrece la bella criatura
un mágico y celeste camino.

De encantación en un derroche,
hiende leda, vaporoso tul;
y me guía a través de la noche

la niña de la lámpara azul.

Things you just discover --- Songs for Edna.

It is not possible to keep up with all that is going on but there will always be interesting new discoveries. This is one of them and yet another that comes from Brighton. The Edna of the album title is Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950) who was the first woman to receive the Pulizer Prize for Poetry, for The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923). Caroline Weeks has appeared in these pages before however, if only in pictures as her alter ego Ginger Lee as part of Bat For Lashes' band at Latitude 2007.

This picture was taken by Natasha 'Bat For Lashes' Khan.

The album is available on vinyl Manimal Vinyl Records (MANI 004).

I suspect that it will not be an album threatening the best-seller lists of 2009 and that is a shame. The seemingly recherché source material does not mean that this album is in any way difficult or inaccessible. It is the sublime; neither obviously poems set to music nor music to accompany poems and what you didn't know you would probably never even suspect.