Isla Craig

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Echo’s Reach, the new album from Isla Craig has become a comfort over the past couple of weeks. It’s a record born of a need for meditative space in an increasingly claustrophobic world. The songs were formed during walks in search of sacred space within city life, carving out moments of peace that blocked the noise. Honestly, even living further from the city center these days, the creeping need for a human buffer has become paramount, and Craig embodies an increasing desire for solitude. With odes to autumn air, dogwood hues, smoke, wood and peat amber, the natural world crawls through the crevices of her songs, overtaking the modern structures of society one line at a time.

Isla’s songwriting embraces the connective tissue between folk and jazz, layering pieces with flanneled sax and smoke curls of flute. The album not only muses on nature, but evokes it musically. In the same way that works from Fairport, COB, Pentangle, and Anne Briggs radiate the onset of cold and a constant pulling inward towards oneself, the record is steeped in chill at a tipping point when splendor turns barren. Though to only compare this to the folk set is disingenuous, it’s Briggs if she returned to working with some of the more woolen jazz works of The Cosmic Range, Cole Pulice and Lynn Avery. While Craig has been working in this vein for some time, Echo’s Reach finds her at her most inviting, and with a November release, not a moment too soon.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

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