Returning to new sounds

H e l l o friends and followers,

I've spent the past two weeks or so out on the road with the Irish songwriter Fionn Regan, adding 'tour manager' to the list of jobs I've found my way to beneath this oddly-shaped GFP umbrella. It was a strange time, honestly. A small-scale but no-less relentless run of shows around the UK, from central Edinburgh, through small Yorkshire towns, down to the tip of the Pembrokeshire coastline, and back across the south coast of England to finish in Brighton. A whirlwind of leaving and arriving, hotel breakfasts and soundchecks, motorways and A-roads, all leading us to 70 minutes of beautiful live music each night.

It was a showing of what it all means to people, those of us who carry songs with us as small extensions of ourselves, of pieces of our own lives and journeys. Also a glimpse into the oddness of life on tour, both the magnetic nature of it and also the more knotted and complicated parts; pieces that sit between stress and strain and the strange shape that the days take on within that always unstable environment.

I expected more downtime for listening and writing. I hadn't meant to take the majority of the time off. There is downtime, you see – often lots of it – but it always feels like a catching-up and a checking-in with yourself. A kind of recovery mode you need to enter and follow. I managed to swim in the sea more times than I ate dinner time. I'm not sure I slept well once within the revolving wall of hotel rooms and their singular sounds and temperatures and mattress types.

Be nice to your touring bands. It's a weird world out there.

I am home now. The day fades earlier than before I left. Today it has barely even risen at all, and rain is lashing against the windows. I just now realised it's Halloween today. A new season has arrived and I am still catching up.

And I am also catching up on my listening, on a couple of weeks worth of new songs and albums. Today in particular offers another heavy armful of seasonal treats.

To kick-start my return to writing and sharing, I thought it best to show you what I am planning on listening to quietly and carefully today: just click on the artist name to find your way to the work...

The B I G news is that Katie and Allison Crutchfield (Waxahatchee / Swearin') have made a new record together again for the first time in a long time, their new band Snocaps fleshed-out with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. A meeting point between both of their solo work, it's a hefty and heartening burst of indie-rock that burns bright, briefly and, on first listen, brilliantly. A very real and totally unexpected treat.

Zac Little releases a new Saintseneca record today, the band's first new collection of songs in a full seven years. A staple of the indie-rock blog days, the new record feels a little aged and weathered (don't we all) and all the more compelling for it. A sprawling double LP, released via the excellent Lame-O Records, Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs is wholesome and earnest in the best of ways.

A record I feel I know a little more about is Night CRIÚ, the latest work of art from Hillary Woods. Though it's released in full today, I've been lucky enough to have this one for a little while now, and have found the whole thing become more spellbinding with each listen. Pushing her voice into the forefront of the creepy sounds she so beautifully crafts gives the album a real energy – and, as the accompanying text reads, the "unmoored sonic threads recall the cracks, fringes, forgotten agency and dormant personas that surface at night."

Longer-time readers of GFP might remember keiyaA from Issue 7 of A Music Journal – our printed publication – and the Chicago innovator returns today with her first full-length collection since that 2020 release. Offering another mesmerising concoction of r&b, soul, and experimental pop, hooke’s law reaffirms keiyaA's unique sound and vision; a sometimes breathless, always beautiful journey to fully immerse yourself in.

The Icelandic Cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir releases new album Where to From today. I spent a little time with it this morning and it all feels suitably spooky and captivating, her gentle playing threaded with choral vocals and underlying drones that shift the sound like light upon mountains.

I previously wrote about the new collaboration between Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo, and the full album they've made together is released today. Formed of eleven new songs, In The Earth Again somehow really does find a sustainable meeting-point between their very differing sonic spaces (CP make billowing hardcore; HP makes strikingly pretty instrumental guitar music), folding their two worlds together in a way that feels like a remarkable trick of the light. Both a worthy addition to each catalogue, and something very special in its own right.

Owen Ashworth has today shared two new recordings via his Advance Base project. Shared exclusively via Bandcamp, Owen says the songs are "two distant companions, both inspired by real life movie theater & bank robberies, some recalled from my younger days as a San Francisco movie theater employee & others from further back in American history." Appropriately seasonal and solitudinal, they had the same effect on me as all of Owen's music tends to do, holding me right here in place for the five-minutes or so that they stick around, shifting the light of the room, shifting the weight of the day.

I hope you find the same thing in them, and something else here too.

It's nice to be back; thank you for being here.

Tom.