Open your palm, and there it is. The morrow. The next moment. Hold it loose, then leave it be. All that matters is here, now. To listen to London-based duo Spafford Campbell is to dive into the time being, to enter an interior of vast scope and detailed texture, where images linger, lights dim and glow and sounds exchange in ways that command utter presence.
This is Tomorrow Held, the visionary new project by twenty-something mould-breakers and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell. Eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox.
Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Then know that Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre — and finds gold in the embers.
They garnered five-star reviews for their debut album, 2022's You, Golden, a refreshingly unadorned take on traditional, and traditional-sounding, tunes. In March 2024 came 102 Metres East, an EP digitally released on the Real World X imprint and titled for the recent, scientifically measured shift of the global meridian line from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich through a bin-strewn wasteland. “A nice metaphor for England,” they say.
While redolent of Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 opus Spirit of Eden, and riven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is a work of bold singularity. A whole greater than the sum of its parts — parts that include effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment.
• Words by Jane Cornwell
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