Following on from last year’s online-only My Light Shines On programme, traditional music features heavily in the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival, with a series of live performances taking place outdoors, in the quad of Edinburgh University's Old College (pictured below).

Hinged ends with “Moment,” a vaporous mood piece where a reflective voice lightly floats over and weaves between two, three-note keyboard arpeggios, occasional Gamelan-style percussive interjections and odd bubbling sounds. “Moment of clarity” are the final words.

The folk world is slowly coming out of its long pandemic slumber, with Sidmouth’s month-long festival starting in the midst of Storm Evert’s high-summer arrival, and tours from the likes of fiddler extraordinaire Sam Sweeney, Eliza Carthy, and acclaimed newcomer, singer, songwriter and finger-picking guitarist Katherine Priddy, whose debut album is one of the most striking in British folk for some time.

Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica.

What is the Shadow Kingdom and how do you gain access to it? In Bob Dylan’s case, it may be found in the film noir classics of his birth – 1941’s The Maltese Falcon onward – and it’s those noir settings, artfully condensed and reduced to a signature sauce, that dictate the tone of the dim-lit tableaux that decorate the settings for Dylan’s first foray into online streaming.

Craig Fortnam’s music – solo or in the bands North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison – sounds like a lot of things. It sounds like the 70s prog-folk-jazz interface of Kevin Ayres and Robert Wyatt as its influence feeds on into Kate Bush.

The first release that brought folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience to prominence outside of their native Norway was their Live in a Room EP, released in 2000.

Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby. It's because there's so much good music that deserves the words, from jazz to metal to pure electronic strangeness.

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.

If American music has a royal family, it’s surely the Seeger clan. Charles, the patriarch, the composer, musicologist and teacher who could be said to have invented ethnomusicology, married first to Constance de Clyver Edson, a violinist and teacher. That union gave us Pete Seeger, known to generations the world over for the songs “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”.