Sun to Cipria

Lucy Kitchen’s songs are intimate in that they are often love songs, and the performances and backing are closely arranged around her voice, which is a thing of some beauty. It is the voice that dominates; the songs of loss like Searching for Land or He is Lost to Me suit her perfectly. In atmosphere the songs have something of Nick Drake about them. Hollow has that peculiarly bucolic jazzy feel; it’s folk music but it’s reaching out to other forms. Those other forms include the usual bedfellows like country – the billowing of pedal steel on Lovers In Blue doesn’t overwhelm, it just does its job of counterpointing the harmonies. It’s interesting that when the strings arrive they are formal violins rather than the fiddles you might expect, so the pedal steel, when it returns, seems quite maverick.

An exciting figure among the avant-garde of Paris in the 1920s, Caresse Crosby is little known today. She and her husband Harry founded the Black Sun Press, early publishers of such titans as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.

There's a whole universe out there…