Two of Britain\u2019s most exciting folk musicians, both of Hebridean heritage, are behind Donn\/Dubh (Black\/Brown), an album inspired by Saltair na Rann, a 10th-century Celtic collection of cantos in which sacred history is foretold, and winds are given colours. Angeline Morrison and Arun Sood expand its spectrum of northerly and westerly shades, soldering together traditional Gaelic texts and tunes with distortion, drone, dream-pop and post-rock.<\/p>\n
The pair have the chops for such a project. Morrison, co-founder of the Black British Folk Collective, has brilliantly brought forgotten Black histories into the folk canon for years, including on 2022\u2019s The Sorrow Songs. That same year, Sood\u2019s Searching Erskine used sonic collage and old recordings to conjure the lives of residents on his grandmother\u2019s abandoned home island of Vallay. Their talents converge around Alastair Smith\u2019s startling production: Morrison\u2019s deep voice, ghostly one moment, lullaby-warm the next, inhabiting soundworlds recalling the shuddering shadows of late-90s Boards of Canada and Unkle.<\/p>\n
Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison: Donn\/Dubh. <\/p>\n
But Morrison opens A R\u00ecbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn\u2019 Agad (Young Maiden, Do You Remember?) over a softly played piano, and gentler moments like this anchor the pair\u2019s giddy explorations. So does a 1952 recording of Sood\u2019s uncle psalm-singing on \u00d2ran Molaidh (Praising Song), bowed cellos and synths buoying him, before Sood\u2019s rich Scottish voice enters, speaking of a time \u201cbefore God\u201d.<\/p>\n
Sweeter moments include Mo Nighean Donn As B\u00f2idhche (My Most Beautiful Brown-Haired Girl), rippling by on shimmering electronics, and Teann A-nall Mo Chailin Donn (Come Here, My Brown-Haired Maid), setting a Uist love song against gauzy, Twin Peaks-worthy walls of synthesisers. The album\u2019s darker turns are powerful: Tha Mi Sg\u00ecth (Fairy Song) twists Sood\u2019s daughters\u2019 voices into Boards of Canada-adjacent folk horror. Full of febrile layers, this album\u2019s ambitions unpeel with every tantalising listen.<\/p>\n
Also out this month<\/p>\n
Live at Dingle\u2019s 1974<\/a> (self-released) is the first official release from London folk singer Clive Woolf, whose career ended at 28 after a debilitating brain illness. Recorded just weeks before he stopped playing, it captures the singer and guitarist\u2019s soulful spirit, especially on a stunning a cappella Low Down in the Broom (now in his 80s, he still attended the Cecil Sharp House folk club as a listener until the pandemic). Goblet<\/a> sound like the wayward offspring of Milkweed and the Focus Group, and Elfgiffu House is their debut album on an exciting new London DIY label (Circle Dance). Led by Amy Lawrence, her project imagines a future Cornish utopia through eerie vocal ensembles, recorders, kelhorns and Breton bombardes. Cinder Well<\/a>\u2019s A Blooming Body<\/a> (Hen House Studios) finds the US artist wading into starker waters following her successful theme tune for Small Prophets, although her grasp of Americana glows on the gorgeous Of Nettles and Roses.<\/p>\n This article was amended on 7 August 2026. Cinder Well is American, not Irish as an earlier version said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two of Britain\u2019s most exciting folk musicians, both of Hebridean heritage, are behind Donn\/Dubh (Black\/Brown), an album inspired…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60],"class_list":["post-585968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}