The Memory Band Landscape Music Volume 5 (A Fair Field Full Of Folk)

On their fifth album The Memory Band return once more to the ghost-lit back-roads of British traditional music where digital machinery and acoustic musicians congregate to make old music from the future. The Memory Band navigate a dream landscape of fading identity, dredging up forgotten histories from old maps, half-filled diaries, government records and lists left inside magazines detailing obsolete television schedules. The music was fed by stories of magical hares and the recollections of ballad sellers bearing placards at the great fairs of times past, the fields of which now lie buried beneath leisure centres, electricity substations, and retail parks. It traces the connection between the headstone of a man killed in Norfolk by the sails of a windmill, the first observations of solar flares, incendiarism, council estates and an old man's recollection of ploughing the land by starlight in another time. Since 2002 The Memory Band has been producing its own modern recipe of traditional music with a rolling cast of contributors led by producer Stephen Cracknell. A Fair Field includes vocal contributions from Liam Bailey, Helene Bradley, Hannah Caughlin and Nancy Wallace and features the rhythm section of Olie Brice on double bass, Fred Thomas on piano and Tom Page on drums with strings by Lucy Railton and Rob Spriggs.