Till April is Dead: A Garland of May

In these garlands for May, Lisa Knapp sounds ardent and pure, driven by purpose and conviction. You can tell these songs are for real, not make-believe. Her voice, and the discrete musical settings featuring her partner and producer Gerry Diver, drummer Pete Flood and Knapp herself on strings, organ, keyboards and hammered dulcimer, is layered in the fabric of birdsong, clock chimes, bells and Victorian-era barrel organs. These are mechanical devices from a time when the May rites were still widely celebrated, and the folk tradition itself was being documented.

Blur's Graham Coxon plays and sings harmony vocals on ‘Searching for Lambs’, while Current 93's David Tibet lives it up on ‘Staines Morris’, originally published in 1653 as ‘The Maypole Song’, and Mary Hampton guests in the ‘Bedfordshire May Day Carol’. The clock chimes and pastoral whimsy is reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd weaving their exultant charms. Knapp's voice is the voice of spring perceiving itself anew, and the music is the sound of a magical, not mechanical, universe.