Some music challenges your conceptions and some calms the troubled waters of your mind – did you know that 85% of your brain is actually water, by the way? – and some music does both. Music like Amy Duncan’s album “Potential Space” perhaps. Well yes, and it does so in an understated and beguiling way.
In Ms Duncan you’ll find a practiced practitioner of the folk genre but not one stuck in the past and, being a collaboration with Scottish poet David Paton, there are no doubts regarding the intelligence or literacy of the results whether you consider the allegorical yet traditional folk styled “Rare And Free” or the minimalist ambient electronica of “Natural“or the civilised elegance to be found in “Untitled”.
Ms Duncan’s voice is used to good effect throughout with a style that varies between an endearing mature warmth to a sort of childlike innocence and it is this ability to adjust her voice to a song that impresses most with the convincing emotional fragility of “Gateways” and the double tracked Wicker Man stylings of “Enter The Forgiveness” being particular highlights.
“Potential Space” is a hypnotic fusion of city and country and indeed of the past and the present. Never raucous or forced, this is the ideal album to chill out with of an evening.
The album can be obtained from Bandcamp amongst other places