Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. 

Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. 

I come to this album from a week or so spent among the denizens of the New York and Boston folk revivals, including a key figure from Tulsa and the Guthrie Center, and a concert (Judy Collins, marking 85 years of music and activism).

Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she seems in a jollier frame of mind. She has veered into overtly electronic pop before, especially on her 2016 album Good Advice, but this time it’s a bubblier, warmer version. Then again, these nine songs still find room for heartache.

On the first date of a 17-concert tour that had its preview at Celtic Connections in January, Across the Evening Sky begins with the liminal, predatory dangers of associating in any way with the sly “Reynardine”, with Matt Robinson on piano and electronic keyboards and Alec Bowman-Clarke’s bass evoking the twilit murk of the magical faerie song, recorded by Sandy on Fairport’s Liege & Lief.

It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.

The quandary is this. Middlesbrough singer Amelia Coburn made one of my favourite albums of last year, her debut, Between the Moon and the Milkman, and I hear she’s playing live near me on the south coast, not something that happens every day.

This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20^th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.

It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period  was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence.

Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to the world under the alias of “Bob Dylan”.

Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke ocean spray or wind. In one case, a wordless vocal edges towards articulating recognisable syllables.