Hannah James & Toby Kuhn - Where All Our Names Belong

The duo’s second album, featuring James on vocals, accordion and sansula, Kuhn on cello, revolves around a theme of belonging, embracing songs and dance tunes. Where All Our Names Belongs opens with the traditional Lonesome Woods, collected from Henry Perkes in the New Forest in 1908. A song of love and betrayal, it splits musically into two tunes, the first traditional, with its underpinning drone and pulsing cello, and the second, bridged by foot percussion, an original based around accordion.

The first of the originals, penned by James, is Apple Tree, a sparse, cello-pulsed song of death and rebirth, returning to the earth, here feeding an apple tree that will in turn bring fruit and a nest. This is followed by Dancefloor, written some years back as a bourrée. Opening with wheezing accordion before the cello arrives it’s transformed here into a slightly Balkan-sounding number about music and dance lifting burdens and bringing people together.

Featuring a foot percussion intro with cello giving a passable double bass impression, James says at the start that the semi-spoken Chicken is not a political song, but then somewhat belies that by continuing “It’s a song about a chicken / A very proud, orange chicken who would strut around the barnyard, always making sure everyone knew who he was”. It doesn’t take much to spot which particular cockerel who things their crowing makes the sun come up it’s talking about.

Set to jazzy plucked cello and more foot percussion, The Weaver is her retelling of the woman who makes and remakes the world as found in the Lakota Nation story White Buffalo Calf Woman. With a connecting maternal thread, it’s followed with two reflections on love and motherhood, Soft Edges with its poetic lines about her daughter giving way to the tenderly wheezing Celtic mist-tinged instrumental Into The Light.

Babies give way to cats with another instrumental with the plucked notes and playfully dancing accordion of Jezza, before turning to ecological thoughts with the sparse Forest, dedicated to the late Douglas Boise, a lepidopterist who specialised in moths, captured in the lines “In the light / She pulls me from sleep / Beating in, in through the window”.

Written for a mythical folk club, Upstairs at the Star is the final instrumental, a dreamy weaving of rhythms and tunes that take you from sway to tapping feet. The album ends with another song drawn from folk mythology, Rising. It speaks of the lake-woman of seven names, Jezerka who tends the lands and waters with her song of healing in the Slovenian countryside round Lake Cerkniško Jezero, though in this telling not, you’ll be pleased to hear, malevolent creatures that abduct and eat lost children!

Coming with a large illustrated card booklet featuring notes and lyrics, it’s an immersive listening experience that shifts between power and delicacy and, while unlikely to promote much dance floor activity should certainly soothe the stresses of the day.