Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bridget Hayden is best-known as a member of the Vibracathedral Orchestra, a collective founded in Leeds whose commitment to drone-based minimalism prioritised slowly shifting textures over melody. To the extent that the VCO were influenced by folk music at all, it was at the freakier end of the spectrum.So it is initially surprising to find Hayden embrace the full purity of the eight traditional songs on this album. Titled Cold Blows the Rain, it was recorded late at night in a fraternal lodge in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, the band spending the daytime making the most of a rare stretch of good weather. Hayden, who mostly played violin for the VCO, here sings and plays banjo, cello and a range of gruff analogue synthesisers. She is joined by The Apparitions: Sam Mcloughlin on harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill on viola.Yet the emphasis on texture persists. Songs unfold in an echoing nocturnal drag like old 45s slowed down to 33s, the slightest adjustments of key in the harmonium drone registering with seismic significance, and the prickle of banjo on “Are You Going To Leave Me?” shining like a brief moment of sunlight.The tracklist, mostly learned from Hayden’s mother, Anne, to whom the album is dedicated, includes many widely covered old warhorses. “Blackwater Side” stretches out expansively, Hayden relishing its semitonal shifts. The ghostliness of “She Moved Through The Fayre” is here further unsettled by a nagging synth pulse throbbing away in the same register as her singing.Often an airy gallop, “When I Was In My Prime” here becomes a meditation on loss and the passing of time. This sense of abandonment persists on the Appalachian song “Red Rocking Chair”, where the keening singing melds with the slow-bowed strings, and on the closing “The Unquiet Grave”, where the narrator’s refusal to accept the death of a lover postpones eternal rest. “Make yourself content, my love,” she sings at the end of the song’s eight stark minutes, “till God calls you away.”★★★★☆‘Cold Blows the Rain’ is released by Basin Rock
