PBS6

Hatched by bodhran player Will Lang of folk-fusion group Park Bench Social Club and Newcastle-based guitarist and producer Tom Wright, the idea behind Northumbrian collective PBS6 is to jettison genre and geography in an ambitious amalgam of folk and hip-hop, featuring musicians and music from Australia and Britain. The core line-up benefits from the contrasting textures of accordion from champion UK player Shona Kipling, beatboxer Jason Singh, Mancunian rapper MC Crystalize, and jazz singer Tessa Smith.

The album was conceived during an Australian tour made last autumn, gathering together stories and testimonies from émigrés such as Northumbrian¬born Pat Riley, a resident since the 1950s of Newcastle, New South Wales, whose voice features on a recast version of ‘Byker Hill’. The songs connect opposite ends of the earth via shipping routes, a shared folk tradition and an eclectic global beats aesthetic. The opening track ‘21.00 GMT – Southern Hemisphere, with its brooding backing and lyric by Australian poet James Lister Cuthbertson, is followed by ‘Footprints’, a folk-rap sound collage that begins with a radio announcer heralding the coldest English winter for a century before segueing into ‘Waters of the Tyne’ and a rap from MC Crystalize, who holds up a glass to 21st-century binge-drinking in the light of the gin laws of 1604 on the later ‘21.00 GMT – Northern Hemisphere’. It’s an album that feels packed, effusive and eclectic, as well as slightly chaotic. For this listener, the intensity and beauty of Shona Kipling’s solo air ‘Shown’ for her late father provided a very welcome and profound rest.