Spafford Campbell

Spafford Campbell are twenty-something mould-breakers and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell.

The two first met as teenaged members of the National Youth Folk Ensemble, a grassroots initiative bringing together talented young musicians from across England to create and perform new arrangements of folk music. The connection, they say, was immediate. The duo Spafford Campbell began playing live in 2018, prompting double takes with their delicacy, dynamism and seemingly telepathic exchanges, with the startling intimacy of musical conversations nurtured in improv-led writing sessions.

Their latest album Tomorrow Held is a visionary body of eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox. Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Then know that Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre — and finds gold in the embers.

While redolent of Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 opus Spirit of Eden, and riven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is a work of bold singularity. A whole greater than the sum of its parts — parts that include effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment.

Spafford Campbell is represented by Wildtune for international bookings.

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