Red River Dialect Share New video for “BV Kistvaen” with February Tour Dates.

Following the release of their album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts in September, Red River Dialect have announced a string of UK tour dates for February 2020. The band also play their sold-out album launch tomorrow night, Saturday 16 November at Servant Jazz Quarters. To celebrate, they’re sharing the beautifully animated video for “BV Kistvaen”, made by animator and band member Robin Lane Roberts.

The video is inspired by the “Money Pit” legend, one of many folktales from Dartmoor in south west England in which someone raids a pre-historic burial chamber seeking ancient wealth, but loses something more vital in the act. A “kistvaen” is a Bronze Age tomb, made of granite slabs inlaid in the ground and covered with a capstone, and is particular to Dartmoor. The name is derived from “cist-veyn” in the ancient Cornish-Celtic language, and “cist-faen“ in Welsh; Cist meaning chest, and “veyn” or “faen” meaning stone.

In this particular tale a jolly farmer dreams of a local kistvaen overflowing with money. He breaks open the tomb, spurred on by a mocking raven, only to find a small piece of black flint, shaped like a heart. Some speculate that this may have been a Neolithic arrowhead. He clings to this treasure, and becomes cruel, morose and bitter. Only the playfulness of his child, who takes the flint out to the moors to play with and loses it, relieves this heavy curse.

The lyrics speak of a child throwing stones, ‘alone and burrowing in’, and later of a ‘kist-open mind’. David says of the song: “it was inspired by a journey into Dartmoor, and the lyrics venture into buried sadnesses of the past. Having been uncovered, these artefacts can unsettle and cause pain, but with compassion for self and others, they can be released back to the wild equanimity of the moorlands.”   

[youtube https://youtu.be/1sjcniekqD8]

Red River Dialect On Tour

Morris having handed back his monk’s robes and left the monastery, and the band will reunite to play the songs from Abundance Welcoming Ghosts on November 16th, almost a year after the album was recorded in rural Southwest Wales. Mark your calendars, and get tickets from Servant Jazz Quarters in London.

13/02/20 Brighton – TBC
14/02/20 Plymouth – The Junction
15/02/20 Penryn – The Fish factory 
16/02/20 Bristol – The Cube 
17/02/20 York – The Crescent (with Ye Vagabonds) 
18/02/20 Glasgow – The Glad Cafe 
19/02/20 Todmorden – The Golden Lion
22/02/20 – London – Rough Trade East (free)

Red River Dialect’s New album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts Is Out Now

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Red River Dialect‘s expansive new album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts is now available to stream and purchase worldwide. Recorded right before songwriter David Morris moved to a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, and featuring guest appearances from Joan Shelley and Tara Jane O’Neil, the record has earned acclaim from Uncut, MOJO, and notably, The Guardian, who chose it as their Folk Album of the Month, perceptively describing it as “anti-colonialist folk … a wide-eyed, curious creature, willingly alert to the world,” noting the “alternate seduction and disquiet on this worldly album steeped in the British landscape.” 

Album Narrative

Whilst touring during the early months of 2018 in support of Broken Stay Open Sky, their fourth album and first for label Paradise of  Bachelors, Red River Dialect uncovered a new depth of communication in their playing, and the follow-up bears the fruit. Abundance Welcoming Ghosts finds the British folk-rock band relaxing into a natural, playful confidence: tangling with the thickets, wading in the river, digging the peat, and disappearing into the mountains. It was recorded at Mwnci Studios, in a quiet valley in Southwest Wales, during four days in August 2018, just a month before the band’s songwriter David Morris left the UK for a nine-month meditation retreat at a remote Buddhist monastery on the cliffs of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. This plan had not yet taken shape when he wrote these songs during the spring of 2018. By the time the band reached the studios, the imminent hiatus lent a poignant and celebratory atmosphere to the sessions. The compositions had not been fully formed prior to recording, but any pressure was transmuted into invigoration, resulting in the jubilant energy that adorns even the most turbulent songs.

The album title gestures towards a fullness that the songs fulfill, a sonic and lyrical plenitude, but any density achieved by the band opens up further space. This expansiveness bears testament to the skill of long-term collaborator and guide Jimmy Robertson (Michael Chapman, Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode), who engineered and mixed the songs. Guest musicians Joan Shelley, who sings the hidden spaces on “Snowdon” and “Piano,” and Tara Jane O’Neil (Rodan, the Sonora Pine), who plays sweet aching slide guitar on “My Friend,” complement the core sextet. Ed Sanders’ violin alternates between soaring with crisp highland sadness on “BV Kistvaen” and burying jaws into the flesh of songs like “Salvation.” Coral Kindred-Boothby’s bass swings the anchor in deep blue fathoms, but frequently dances up to the clouds; she sings heart-swelling, radiant harmonies on “My Friend.” Lead guitarist Simon Drinkwater weaves spry and subtle lines just under the surface of the ocean, breaking for gasps of air and bicycle kicks, slicing the air on “Snowdon” and “Blue Sparks.” Kiran Bhatt rides the drums out to all the cardinal points, tapping high bright stars on “Piano” and pulsing with the circular tide on “Two White Carp.” Robin Stratton has one hand rummaging in the swamp around “Red River” and the other under a waterfall on “Slow Rush”; his piano and organ playing flow like water into both rhythm and lead roles.

There are songs about finding oneself a mountain and finding mountain summits disappearing. The thread of mourning that has long held sway in Morris’ songwriting, particularly on 2015’s Tender Gold and Gentle Blue, is not fully unravelled. There are familiar questions about allegiances to caution and pensiveness, but the songs edge ever closer to abandoning restraints, including the desire to achieve coherence in meaning as some form of salvation. The path of healing continues to draw the attention of Morris’ lyrics, which traverse a blurring of outer and inner landscapes. The sun, the moon, and the six elements of fire, water, earth, wind, space, and consciousness dance across these two realms. Love for friends, family, old flames, and old ghosts burns brightly and sometimes fiercely. Regarding the title, he points to a quote attributed to the eleventh century Tibetan spiritual master Machig Labdrön,

“In other traditions demons are expelled externally. But in my tradition demons are accepted with compassion.”

The act of naming and being named threads through the album. Notably, the song “Red River” narrates the history of the tongue from which the band take their name, and the colonial dynamic replicated in the process. Tombs on Dartmoor, tenor bells in Wales, and locations from dreams expand the physical, temporal, and psychic landscape. Wales also inhabits the evocative paintings of Jane Hope, which adorn the covers. Her compositions are inspired by and drawn from tales found in the Mabinogion, the ancient cycle of Welsh legends, but are also informed by irrupting subconscious imagery and the sensation of timeless symbolic forces finding old friends. In this weaving of archaic tradition and a felt sense of the unknown nowness, these paintings echo the way that Red River Dialect peer back at their British folk and folk-rock forebears, from Fairport Convention and Jackie Leven to Talk Talk.

The band will be re-uniting to play these songs in the latter part of 2019, when Morris hands back his monk’s robes and leaves the monastery, almost a year after this album was recorded.  

Acclaim for Red River Dialect

Straddling past and present, this is Red River Dialect’s most sunny and easygoing record to date… The record’s brilliance is most evident in its seamless shifts within the jam, as well as its general air of jubilance. Its earthen quality and atmospheric ease mirrors the mountains, rivers, and forests sung about by bandleader David Morris, a practicing Buddhist whose enlightenment is revealed through his lyrical poems and traditionally minded delivery. 

– Uncut

The most underrated folk-rock band in Britain. The idea of them as a Cornish-born, Buddhist-inclined Waterboys is more potent than ever. Their fifth album of elementally-battered, rueful and rousing folk-rock … is as stirringly anthemic as they’ve managed thus far. 

– MOJO

Red River Dialect have always ploughed their own furrow, with each album taking them to deeper and deeper levels, far beneath the soil. A rich, fulsome, lyrical experience, Abundance Welcoming Ghosts finds the band’s ragged, intense Americana rooted in the weight of history, with each song feeling torn from Victorian newspaper reports. 

– Clash

Gorgeous and moving, anchored by the heft of the physical but reaching for more. The epic spareness, the way it manages to be both still and an enveloping swirl, reminds me most of Talk Talk. There’s a prayerful intensity to the quiet bits, a listening, wondering awe, that makes the rock payoffs more powerful. The album works as a restless, searching, gorgeous whole. Morris and his band have never been better. 

– Dusted

Abundance Welcoming Ghosts is a heady album rife with heartfelt journeys … rugged folk-rock [that] concerns itself with journeys, exploring the topography of self, the ridges and contours of the past and geography itself — sometimes all at once. 

– Exclaim

It’s not often that a band comes along and over the course of nine songs both plays to the tradition and stands it on its ear. RRD has taken the challenge of playing with reckless abandon to heart, generating an album that stands on the shoulder of giants showing no fear. 

– Folk Radio

9/10. Wondrous and dramatic. This is folk music that glances into the darkness of deep tradition with a wide-open heart. It’s melodic meditation without fear. It’s a beautiful pause that finds an antiquated silence, just like the drama in a Thomas Hardy novel. It cuts various voiced confessions from the soul of humanity—Scot, Gaelic, Cree, and Ojibwa–that speak, and sing to the very human heart. This is a very beautiful and very spiritual record.

– Soundblab

The band stretches out a rhapsodic melody like a ribbon chasing the wind. 

–  NPR