The artists tapping into the mystery of the ancient and elemental

As Big Tech and the onslaught of ever-more divisive voices wreak havoc with our future, a new wave of artists is illuminating the present day with often strange, experimental music that blends traditional and elemental sounds with notions of queerness, ancestry, diaspora and resistance – a quietly radical act that is creating ritual for the here and now.

On the altar, three women in long, dark dresses stand in formation, ready to call towards the divine. Their music has a bone-deep familiarity, recalling the gothic sounds of 1980s 4AD, but also something older, more instinctual. The singer plays a self-made instrument called a dwydelyn, or ‘two-harp’, and communes in Welsh, the language of her ancestors. This is Tristwch Y Fenywod – Welsh for ‘the sadness of women’ – playing their intense, foreboding Welsh-language songs in the surrounds of a Victorian church. The spell cast by their 2024 self-titled album has continued to enchant audiences at festivals and shows across Europe this year. “We’ve had so many people say to us that even though they don’t understand the lyrics, they understand the emotion of the music,” drummer Leila Lygad says.

Tristwch Y Fenywod are among a growing number of artists whose music taps into the power and mystery of the ancient and elemental. Each presents their own radical reclamation – and expansion – of tradition, ritual and ancestral knowledge, from RÓIS, who melds the Irish vocal practice of keening with visceral electronics, to Thorn Wych, whose startling music is played on handcrafted instruments made from native British tree branches. A significant number of the year’s best albums twist the bones of folk into something new: Poor Creature’s All Smiles Tonight imbues ancient Irish songs with glittering psychedelia; Milkweed’s Remscéla is a hauntological take on Irish mythology; and Brìghde Chaimbeul’s Sunwise is a revelatory kaleidoscope of pipe song.

These artists, though diverse in style and approach, are often working in resistance to a destructive capitalist world. “Perhaps, with our lives being dominated by technology and feeling quite isolated, there is something in the rawness of this music that we deeply connect with,” suggests Lisa Meyer, founder of Birmingham’s Supersonic festival, which in recent years has welcomed artists including Irish drone-folk group Lankum, Cornish-language folk singer Daisy Rickman and experimental duo Calliope, who reimagine folk traditions of the Black diaspora. “[These artists] take traditional melodies and forms but push them to their limits, stretching structures, exploring dissonant harmonies and incorporating modern sonic textures. This creates a tension between the old and the new, making the music feel radical and alive.” 

Another artist who works with this tension is Quinie, a.k.a. singer and artist Josie Vallely. Using the Scots language she grew up around, Vallely takes inspiration from 20th-century Aberdeenshire Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins, whose style merged folk ballad singing with more unusual vocal mimicry. “She talked a lot about the influence of her father’s pipe playing on her singing – she was a unique singer who brought together new influences,” Vallely says of Higgins’ own radical take on tradition. “This attitude gave me permission, to myself, to continue her line of enquiry – what does it mean to combine old and new, voice and pipes, playful and severe, Scots and Gaelic traditions? It’s not something I’ll ever ‘achieve’. But that’s what’s good about it – it will be a life’s entertainment trying.”

This year’s album Forefowk, Mind Me, released on the reliably left-field Upset the Rhythm label, is a document of overlapping lives and times. Vallely gathered and wrote its songs on a journey across rural Argyll – accompanied by her horse, Maisie – engaging with stories of current and historical residents. The songs are sung in her bold, beguiling vocal style – a form of ‘diddling’ or pipe mouth music that has its origins in the vocal mimicry of bagpipes. Like fellow Scot Brìghde Chaimbeul, whose textural work features both instrumental pipe playing and vocalisations, Vallely has an all-encompassing – and seemingly limitless – fascination with pipe sounds. She studies diddling with dedication, but it also feels intrinsic. “There are a number of excellent pipers in the Vallely family,” she explains. “I listen to them and draw inspiration from their melodies and ornamentation. But there is also just something in my body that feels great when I click into pipe mode. It’s like I was made to sing like that.” Vallely’s music is a subtle reclamation of a form historically marginalised along lines of gender and ethnicity. 

Never quite fitting into the trad folk scene, Vallely found her home in the thriving Scottish underground, via early releases on wide-reaching Glasgow label GLARC: “They totally embrace the amateur approach, the half-formed idea, and understand my reverence for the songs.” Since then, her collaborators have included avant-garde piper Harry Gorski-Brown, multi-instrumentalist Oliver Pitt and artist Cass Ezeji, whose work illuminates Gaelic speakers of African heritage. “I take the ‘do what you like’ attitude of DIY and combine it with the ‘cherish what has come before’ values of the folk tradition,” she says of her approach. “I see them as complementary rather than contradictory.” 

Tristwch Y Fenywod have also found community in the DIY scene, specifically via Leeds venue Wharf Chambers: “The first place where I felt I could be all the things that I am, and I’m just accepted for it,” singer Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth says. This inclusivity extends to the Welsh language and folkloric cultural communities they are involved in – sites of cultural preservation and ancestral connection, where they encounter many queer, neurodivergent women like themselves. “Maybe that says something about the position that LGBTQ people have held in communities throughout history, as people who are more connected to a spiritual idea,” bassist Sidni Sarffwraig suggests. “We’re playing that role in a contemporary setting – think about who witches were: they were the queer and trans women.” Other queer people taking up this role include Welsh harpist Cerys Hafana and the chaotic four-piece Goblin Band, who recontextualise trad tunes to reflect contemporary queer life. Nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective illuminate the anti-fascist, queer roots of English folk songs, with offshoot projects including Jacken Elswyth’s improvised banjo experiments. These artists’ approach to traditional forms could be seen as queer in and of itself – as Shovel Dance Collective put it, “a patchwork stitched together and rearranged”. 

Another artist exploring ancestral connection in an expansive, imaginative mode is Muco, a London-based singer, multi-instrumentalist and improvisor of British-Burundian heritage. His album Soþlice features warm, moving interpretations of both English and Burundian verse. “I play an instrument called the inanga, a zither from Burundi/Rwanda, and experiment by combining medieval lyrics in Old and Middle English with East African folk rhythms and melodies,” he explains, citing his song Guhoza Umwana / Als I Lay, which speaks to the universality of parenthood by combining lullabies from Burundi and 14th-century England. “My grandfather on my father’s side was an English poet, and my great-grandfather on my mother’s side played the inanga. My whole life, the meeting of their worlds in me seemed unlikely. I like the thought that perhaps they weren’t that far apart to begin with.”

Another song, Burial of the Dead, interprets a poem by fifth-century Latin writer Prudentius as pure sonics, created from layers of viola and koto, a Japanese zither. “I aimed to capture the phrasing and rhythm of the words in my playing,” Muco says of the resulting “funerary procession”, which retains a foundation of reverence. Much as the emotion of a Tristwch Y Fenywod song can still be communicated to a non-Welsh speaker, the mood of this wordless piece is clear to the listener – connecting, as it does, with a deep-rooted humanity. “My hope is that someone listening to the music can still find the words buried somewhere within it, just as we are all eventually buried, but still leave behind our trace on the world.” 

It almost goes without saying that, in today’s climate of isolationist nationalism, these bold, exploratory and often cross-cultural approaches to tradition are especially refreshing. The co-option of traditional music – and any other cultural form – by fascists is not just harmful but ahistorical. “Folk has always been a vehicle for dissent,” Lisa Meyer argues. “Songs about poverty, oppression, rebellion or migration connect directly to real lives and struggles that feel more relevant and relatable than ever.” Although not all strictly ‘folk’, most of these artists foreground the experiences of marginalised people – and for this, they are part of a storied legacy of art and performance as resistance. Marrying the radical and the traditional is a way of showing that all of us are – or have the potential to be – connected to what is innate and foundational. “I’m interested not just in recreating [the past], but reimagining it,” Muco concludes. “Interpretations of historic lyrics and music can connect with what is ancient in ourselves.”