Emily Askew Band - Alchemy

The Guardian 80

(Askew Records)

Folk music and early music has long leapt together, most famously on Shirley and Dolly Collins’s Anthems in Eden. Nearly half a century later, Emily Askew and her band plunge us into the uncanny soundworlds of the past across Europe, carrying us from the 13th to the 17th centuries with beauty, precision and charge. Askew is an outlandishly talented folk multi-instrumentalist, playing fiddle, vielle, recorder, bagpipes, harp, shawm and drum deftly and tenderly throughout. Her voice is also a beacon, free of prettiness and artifice, straight, direct and bold. These arrangements also beguile. O Virgo Splendens uses electronics and bell samples to push it into the future, while Miri It Is, one of the earliest surviving secular songs in Middle English, heaves and yearns stunningly, as does French troubadour song, Amors D’Art. Instruments such as the Nigerian udu and Peruvian cajón add striking textures too. This record is firmly traditional, sure, but it’s also outward-looking and timeless.