b. Harold Ralph Morrison, 30 January 1931, Highlonesome, Missouri, USA, d. 21 December 1993, Springfield, Missouri, USA. Morrison played banjo, guitar, steel guitar and dobro and was also a talented comedian. He made his first radio appearances in 1950 and the following year, he teamed up with fiddler/guitarist Jimmy Gateley, first working with the Red River Rustlers on KJSB Jamestown, North Dakota, before the two moved to WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia. They worked mainly as a duo but on occasions also played in Dusty Owens’ band and played on Columbia Records sessions with Owens in 1954.

2018 marks the 15th anniversary of Great Lake Swimmers. Over seven albums, multiple EPs, live broadcasts, and reissues, the Toronto-based project led by singer-songwriter Tony Dekker has established itself as a beloved indie folk act in their native Canada and beyond. The CBC has called them “a national treasure” while their music has taken them around the world, sharing a sound that is at once familiar and distinct, using the tools of folk music as the starting point to delve deeper.

There was something sinister about Crooked Fingers, both the name of the project and the music that Eric Bachmann wrote at the helm of its ever-shifting lineups over 15 years. He retired the moniker a couple of years ago, but with his third album under his own name, the transformation feels gorgeous and final and irreversible: No Recover.The drunken louts and red devil dawns are a thing of the past now, monuments to a different time. Bachmann, husband and recent father, has some new lenses through which to view the world.

Hunter, the third long player from from the BRIT award and double Mercury Music Prize-nominated Anna Calvi, will be released on 31st August 2018 via Domino. Produced by Nick Launay (Nick Cave, Grinderman) at Konk Studios in London with some further production in LA, the album was recorded with Anna's band - Mally Harpaz on various instruments and Alex Thomas on drums - with the addition of Adrian Utley from Portishead on keys and Martyn Casey from The Bad Seeds on bass. It has a new rawness, a primal energy into which Calvi pushes the limits of her guitar and voice beyond anything she's recorded before. Hunter is the embodiment of the feeling of truly letting go.

Sir Thomas Allen is an established star of great opera house around the world with a huge repertoire - with fifty roles at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden alone – who has now recorded something comp letely different for Champs Hill Records. September Songs is a chance to explore songs he grew up with, loved then and loves still, but repertoire that’s not usually associated with him, the golden age of Broadway and Hollywood with its melodic beauty, lyrical inventiveness and emotional directness. Allen has always hankered to ‘give it a go’ and to explore songs by the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill.

Should you just leave if you want to arrive someday? Ian Fisher has been asking this question since the day he left his rural Missouri farm for Europe. Ten years have passed since then, but never has the musician stayed in one place for more than a month. Vienna, Berlin, New York, Munich, Nashville… All just stations on an endless path.

Peace Town reflects his artistry as well as the emotional elements over the last months of his life in which his medical condition brought issues of mortality, legacy, life and love to the forefront. As such, it stands proudly as one of his best works within a critically-lauded career and made his mark as an interpreter who could take the songs of others and virtually make them his own.

This live recording brings together an extraordinary combination of artistic abundance: Remy Ballot conducting the music of Anton Bruckner, enacted at Bruckner’s place of work, the basilica of St. Florian in Upper Austria. Captured at the annual festival Brucknertage, the musical youth of the Upper Austrian Symphonic Youth Orchestra enjoyed the great honour to give a celebrated performance in a one-of-a-kind setting. The vigour and professionalism joined by the intuition of Ballot provide for some goosebumps and appends another worthy opus to a series which has been critically acclaimed and lavished with prestigious international awards.