Walking, the latest Showcase Session is now available to download from form the Fatea website. This download is free and includes several tracks that are well worth listening to - not  least Katy Kay/Katie Cruel by Rapunzel & Sedayne and Blackthorn Winter by Sproatly Smith.

Do take the time to have a poke around the Fatea website whilst you're over there!

To download your copy, go to http://www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk/ 

Available until 30th April 2012.

Sedayne writes:

Each year we do a special one-off free show as part of the Fylde Festival - same time, same venue (The Mount Hotel, 3.00pm on the Saturday). This year, on the back of Folk Police's OAK ASH THORN CD and other things Bellamist, we thought it might be both pertinent & proper to celebrate Peter Bellamy's Kipling settings in a sequence which includes new arrangements alongside approximations of some of the classic recordings of yore in Folkish All-Live Stars-In-Your-Eyes Style...

For example, everyone who has covered A Tree Song (everyone from Badger in the Bag to The Unthanks indeed) has taken it at a reflectively wistful pace quite unlike PB's rollicking original which he fashioned in the manner of a rousing Wassail. Naturally (even though we're fans of both BitBag and TU) we've gone for the Wassailing. We've also used PB's classic power-trio arrangement of The Liner She's A Lady as the basis of something at least analogous to the original. And whilst Sedayne's rough fiddling is not even in the same league as Chris Birch, Ross's canny anglo more than makes up for it and Rapunzel's banjo gives it a necessary sparkle - but the chorus is the crux of the thing and in field-tests so far it's gone down a storm. Indeed, we hope to inspire a fair bit of joining in - lots of opportunities for fulsome choruses, not least on Frankie's Trade and Mandalay.

We're doing this very much for the Love of it, and in the spirit of this we've opened a Soundcloud page on which we'll eventually be featuring all of our covers of the Kipling:Bellamy canon - each with notes, lyrics and a suitable illustration, and all of them Freely Downloadable. So far, there's 9 up there, with the rest following on in the coming weeks. Don't expect anything too slick, although with a fair wind they do the job quite nicely - and come the gig we'll have them burnished to a homely sheen allowing for other commitments Fylde-wise & elsewhere. So please, check it out & hopefully see you soon in Fleetwood on a five-knot tide with the forts a firing...

http://soundcloud.com/earthboundkiplingbellamy

Bellamy: Kipling with the Tradition

 Ron Baxter (MC & swoonsome croonin)
Ross Campbell (singing & assorted anglos)
Rachel 'Rapunzel' McCarron (singing, guitar, banjo & drum)
Sean 'Sedayne' Breadin (singing, fiddle, citera & kaossilator)

Saturday 3rd September, 3.00pm
The Mount Hotel, Fleetwood.

Admission Free

No, not all of them together, lovely as that would be... We have two new albums out in September - Mancunian folk electronica trio Harp and a Monkey's self titled debut on the 12th, closely followed by Fleetwood's skewed trad duo Rapunzel and Sedayne's Songs From The Barley Temple  on the 26th. You can  pre-order both albums from the Folk Police web store and listen to samples from Rapunzel and Sedayne's album here and Harp and a Monkey's album here. From September, you'll also be able to buy the albums from your local record store and the usual online sources and as downloads from iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and so on. Both albums are already starting to pick up great reviews. Folkwords write that Harp and a Monkey "make each unrestrained song a perceptive portrait of memory, reminiscence, hope and expectation... a realm populated by strange sounds, mordant observations, ghostly images, caustic serenity and pitiless parables. The result is inspired musical imaginations, restless melodic storytelling and expansive horizons." Meanwhile, Spiral Earth write, "Songs From The Barley Temple weaves it way through trad and original numbers with a soft intensity and a tidy amount of darkly disparate methodology... New life is breathed into ancient verse once more. So much more than just keepers of the flame, this is living and breathing folk art".

Pre-order from the Folk Police web store.