Any good Green Man ligger will be well aware that Welsh music (or indeed music in Welsh) has become really rather cool over the last few years, with folk such as Gruff Rhys, Euros Childs, Richard James and Cate le Bon making terrific records that are usually acoustic and distinctively Welsh, all of which are firm favourites of this Blog.

I’ve got something different for you here but definitely of a similar ilk…

Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree

Moving swiftly on from another … shocking… name, (thankfully there’s no sign of people with skye in their hair or stars in their brows…), the Magickal Folk are some sort of collective of musicians travelling the British Isles making recordings in traditional settings, previously only available on long sold-out CDRs. Deserted Village records have now re-packaged and released a couple of these together with some other songs as “The Soup and the Shilling”.

They are beautiful recordings, sung in English, French and Gaelic, and supplemented lavishly by strings (plucked and bowed), pipes and gorgous backing vocals. I rather like all this clever, linguistic dabbling around – it adds a certain outlandishness to a recording and avoids the tricky business of making an old lyric sound fresh. The result is a bunch of quirky, moss-covered folk songs that are not a long way from some of the early Gorky’s records.

Deserted Village profess to know nothing about these Magickal Folk, claiming that they find the recordings in a hollowed out tree stump (I believe them...), and I’m quite happy for this to remain the case – a little unfamiliarity does us no harm.

We do have a few samples made available, however, by the good people at Deserted Village.

Is Iomaidh Coiscéim Fada

Le Bon Marain

Bewitching stuff…