Madame Ceski
Album: Palimpsest
Label: Wooden Spoon
Tracks: 8
Website: http://madameceski.bandcamp.com/releases

Madame Ceski is the stage name for Francesca Simmons, a violinist and independent artist from North Wales who in the past has performed with Collectress, Gruff Rhys, 10 Mewn Bws, Marque Toliver, Fiona Bevan and Orphans & Vandals. She also has a penchant for picking out tunes on an array of ancient and often strange instruments (dulcitone, harpsichord, saw and assorted winds and strings), which she's able to indulge extensively on her debut solo album, Palimpsest, where she creates a decidedly curious, weird and wonderful tapestry of sound that's literally indescribable except perhaps by the term "freak-folk-chamber-music" that appears at the head of her press release.

For some unknown reason, Francesca decided back in 2014 to "shut herself away in a dusty Edwardian house, barricaded the doors with old instruments, and began writing and recording her first album", using just one microphone and playing every part herself. The result was Palimpsest, a collection of gloriously idiosyncratic self-penned songs and instrumental pieces that creates a truly intriguing aural tapestry out of sound collages, unusual timbres and streams-of-consciousness both lyrically poetic and sonically abstract.

Palimpsest is defined as an old document or parchment on which the original writing has been erased and replaced by superimposed new writing, thus by implication also anything reused or altered that still bearing traces of its original form - alternatively and more abstractly, something containing many diverse layers of meaning beneath the surface. The eight pieces making up Madame Ceski's own personal Palimpsest are characterised by a singularly compelling kind of rough-hewn, white-heat experimentalism where a kind of weirdly logical unpredictability is the order of the day - if order is the right word. Madame Ceski's lyrics, clearly inspired by the experience of being alone with just "the mountains, the buzzards and a fright of ghosts", embrace such diverse subject-matter as birds, spinning wheels, bedtime stories and spoons made out of bone, whereas her instrumental pieces range from the mournful, introspective Lonely Waltz to the distinctly unsettling landscape of the tone-poem In The Forest.

Madame Ceski's music is ultra-imaginative, fuelled by dangerous resonances and spooky vocalisations, surely the stuff that dreams and nightmares are made of, and it would be a brave soul that can listen to this album in the pitch dark without feeling quite threatened and not a little frightened - and yet the music within is strangely consoling. It really is a unique and enchanting, if often challenging experience: a tremendously thrilling and stimulating (if eerily elusive and often enigmatic) one that you're absolutely certain never to forget.

David Kidman