• Limited Edition White Cassette

  Cassette + Digital Album

  • 
  • 
  Six years after staging the first Woolf Music festival in 2013, Ptolemaic Terrascope and Terrascope Online founder/editor Phil McMullen had the urge to do it all again.
  
  Once more held in the manorial setting of Cleeve House in Wiltshire, the former home of the extended Virginia Woolf family, Woolf II – A Terrascope Celebration represented a gathering of musical friends, old and new, each one beloved of the ever-discerning Terrascope. Befitting its location, the event was a statelier and more compact version of Phil’s revered and hugely influential Terrastock festivals that criss-crossed America during the 1990s and 2000s. The principle behind Terrastock would carry forward into Woolf; an intimate event where performers were chosen not only because we happened to like their music, but because they are nice folk, with no separation between audience and musicians (most of the audience being musicians).
  
  Phil’s brief to me was to find “a few semi-acoustic acts”, which in the end stretched to 27 performers squeezed into two days, not all of whom could be accurately described as “lightly amped”. High on our list were Trembling Bells, who’d done us proud at a sell-out Terrascope event at London’s Café Oto in 2018. Alas, their leader Alex Neilson explained, they were no more, but we jumped at the chance of bagging his current project, Alex Rex, off the back of a great new album, Otterburn, and with a live sound freshly honed from their first tour.
  
  What transpired was the scintillating set we have here. Drawn mainly from Otterburn and what would become Andromeda, the strength of the material is underscored by some uncomfortably raw soul bearing. So what if it was the only time it rained all weekend? Somehow that seemed entirely fitting. Dylanesque is a lousy and downright lazy term. Even so it’s an apt description of ‘Coward's Song’ and ‘The Cruel Rule’ both of which successfully knock the past forty years of Bobness into a cocked hat. Much of the rest of this fine collection is eminently worthy of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at his best, whilst Alex Neilson’s idiosyncratic count-ins were positively…Neilsonesque? There are pleasing nods towards later era Incredible String Band, too, which is quite appropriate given that there is more than one association between the two acts. However, the song that sticks like an earworm fully conversant with its squatters rights is St Augustine’s wayward prayer ’Please God Make Me Good (But Not Yet)’ off debut album Vermillion. Damn there’s something about that sentiment we just can’t resist.
  
  Due to changes at Cleeve House there are unlikely to be any more Woolfs, and there are currently no plans for further live Terrascope forays. However if we do eventually emerge blinking into the sunlight then don’t bet against Alex Rex being involved or, failing that, any future manifestation of Alex Neilson’s singular musical persona.
  
  Ian Fraser
  For Terrascope Online, August 2021
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of Memory, Speak: Live at WOOLF II – A Terrascope Celebration via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

  Sold Out

• Digital Track

  Streaming + Download

  Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
  Purchasable with gift card

  Buy Digital Track   £1 GBP  or more

  Send as Gift  

• Buy the Full Digital Album

credits

license