Fernhill
Album: Amser
Label: Disgyfrith
Tracks: 13
Website: https://www.fernhill.info

Even after a decade of existence and now seven albums in, Fernhill, centred round the extraordinary vision and talent of singer Julie Murphy, are still something of a best-kept secret, and yet each successive album is an event whose initial dozen or so plays are guaranteed to resonate and mull like fine wine before finally ending up (with due hindsight) as an album-of-the-year-list inclusion that's invariably too late to be officially voted! And so it proves again with Amser, which to my mind is probably the band's finest and most satisfying foray to date, while also by coincidence very likely its most diverse and wide-ranging in terms of source material and inspirations.

Amser is an ambitious, hour-long two-act drama-cum-essay that explores the central theme of time by taking the listener on a multi-faceted journey down that fast-flowing, winding and unpredictably twisting river, here taking the form of a limpid musical watercourse that follows many unexpected and deceptive turns along its length and in so doing can have so stimulating and yet so devastating an effect on everything surrounding it, both landscape and population. "Time mixes and becomes place", indeed. That place can be a disorientating milieu, and our journey through that unknown landscape is, you might feel, of necessity being undertaken without the use of (or even access to) a sufficiently detailed large-scale map of the territory.

And so we just know we're in good hands when our guides are Julie Murphy and her reliable companions (Christine Cooper on fiddle, Ceri Rhys Matthews on guitar and Tomos Williams on trumpet): an assured, symbiotic ensemble so accustomed to working together that its four musicians appear almost to move as one unit with internally responsive interlocking parts, through skilled, intuitive and prescient weaving of entries. They propel us headlong into the current with the opening track Llif, which sports an opening trumpet motif which morphs to enable Julie to sneak in a line or two from Waterloo Sunset, directly invoking the image of the dirty old river that must keep rollin' before morphing back into scat and then into sung Welsh poetry. The uplifting momentum of the onward voyage then steers us swiftly on into the still backwater of Thomas Hardy's poem The Self-Unseeing, smiling into the crackling fire as we attempt to settle down for the night. The following day we rise up and continue on our way along the river path. Whereon, in often bewildering succession, we pass through a host of musical and cultural reference points, the fully charged experience of which proves both spectacular and illuminating. At the same time, though, the unpredictable, unforeseeable nature of time's adventure can be too much to assimilate on even a handful of hearings - and yet the eternal paradox is that it all makes sense as it flows along in real time, immersing you inescapably in the waters. The cryptic eight-minute track Boats moves delightfully and challengingly from Welsh lyric to what sounds like folksy American old-time (a throatier side to Julie) and back again, then into a spirited fiddle reel, following which an interlude of relative calm (Blino Ar Fath Blaned, with some modest, beautifully understated guitar from Ceri) prepares us for an animated, jittery, funky take on the ballad Barbara Elin (just listen to the music and feel the superstition!).

Part two of Amser brings recitation of a Daniel Luws poem then Gwashel's brief resonances of Over The Hills (Sharpe) as prelude to the cycle's kernel, the epicentre title track, which, to the audibly time-standing-still pacing of a ticking clock mechanism, ushers in the rude seasonal processional of "in comes I…", colliding with cultural time in the shape of a brace of well-loved ritual songs (The King and Gower Wassail) en route to the poetic time of its Welsh roots. The processional continues on into the frisky Bro, a would-be scherzo that contains some of the suite's most vivacious trumpet and fiddle interplay and some gloriously cheeky phrasing. The seductively lyrical Harmless then glides effortlessly and naturally between Welsh and English before the album - and our journey through time - draws to a close with Y Folantein, which may or may not be the source of the Page & Plant namecheck tucked away amongst the litany that forms part of the digipack text.

Julie's compelling singing has steered us throughout our journey down the river of time, and kept us captivated through a complex series of textual manœuvres, with the aid of a stimulating, ingeniously coordinated shape-shifting folk-meets-jazz musical backdrop. Individual tracks - I might most accurately term them movements, perhaps - clock in at anything from one to close on nine minutes, but each one is so precisely organised that it takes however long it needs to take, and each movement expands to fill its allotted moment as required (there's no wastage, also no longueurs); and yet the feel is always of looseness, fluidity, elastic time - despite the inevitability of the forward momentum. This may all sound academic, esoteric and, with its integral unashamedly bilingual element, possibly nigh impenetrable, but - believe me - Fernhill's music is anything but inaccessible. Thorny at times maybe, but brilliant! And there, I told you - it's up on that best-of-year-list!

David Kidman