Spafford Campbell

Contemporary folk duo, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell, are blazing a trail that erases genre – and finding pure gold in the embers. Delicacy, dynamism and a seemingly telepathic ability for musical exchange and synchronicity, spell out the magic of Spafford Campbell. The pair first met as teenagers playing traditional music. The connection, they say, was immediate. The duo began playing live in 2018, with the startling intimacy of musical conversations nurtured in improv-led writing sessions. Their latest album Tomorrow Held is a visionary body of eight largely instrumental tracks that folds 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. It’s a ‘quietly groundbreaking’ and ‘beguiling’ (The Times) mix of the traditional and the futuristic. Inspired by Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 album Spirit of Eden, and driven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is also bold and entirely unique with effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment.