The Fox's Wedding, by Sharron Kraus

The Fox's Wedding

by Sharron Kraus

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Kahinat It's really hard to pick just one favorite song from this album - I love it as a whole, perfect folk creation from my most beloved artist. Favorite track: In the Middle of Summer.

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Full Digital Discography

26

releases

Get all 26 Sharron Kraus releases available on Bandcamp and save 40%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Birdloom, K I N, Swift Wings, Welcome to Punkie Night, Friends and Enemies; Lovers and Strangers - second pressing, Joy's Reflection is Sorrow, Time Takes Away, If You Put Out Your Hand, and 18 more. , and , .

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1.	Brigid 04:09	buy track
2.	Green Man 03:23	buy track
3.	In the Middle of Summer 03:52	buy track
4.	July Skies 04:14	buy track
5.	Harvest Moon 03:31	buy track
6.	Would I 04:18	buy track
7.	The Prophet 02:59	buy track
8.	Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes 04:23	buy track
9.	Robin is Dead 02:09	buy track
10.	Ruthless and Alone 02:48	buy track
11.	Made My Home 02:57	buy track
12.	Magpie Child 04:17	buy track

about

Oxford-based musician Sharron Kraus has previously been compared to both Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, but this album is a far darker and more pagan affair than anything by her acknowledged forebears. Taking traditional folk music as her starting point, Kraus adds a sense of innovation that's often startling - she also plays with various avant-noise collectives, something that’s clear here, although not off-puttingly so. The end result is a record that truly updates a fine tradition for modern ears. Recommended.
UNCUT

Oxford based Sharron Kraus is one of the high profile citizens of British underground folk’s invisible republic, writing her own material and singing in a reedy, uninflected voice that recalls Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny, or Mellow Candle’s Clodagh Simonds. In fact she’s been ploughing this furrow for a while, and by default finds herself the tallest poppy in the much broader free folk field that’s sprung up around her. She’s recently released two startling collaborations - with Gillian Chadwick as Rusalnaia, and with Fursaxa’s Tara Burke as Tau Emerald; and almost inevitably her vision has been endorsed by Durtro’s David Tibet.

Kraus’s fifth solo album is a nature girl’s chapbook of rural epiphanies. Violins, viola da gamba, recorders, piano, accordion, and what sound like oboes, gourdes and celestes swirl around her crisp guitar accompaniments. Michael Tanner’s novel use of E-bowed banjo haloes “The Prophet” with a stinging harmonic effect and contributes to the spellbinding version of Thomas Campion’s incantatory ayre, “Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes”, a catalogue of Elizabethan love spells. At its best this is spooky consort music, fecund and mysterious as a Samuel Palmer watercolour.
THE WIRE

Since the release of her 2002 debut album Beautiful Twisted, British singer and musician Sharron Kraus has firmly established herself as a genuine heiress to the UK folk ancestry of Shirley Collins, Lal Waterson, or Maddy Prior. As a solo artist and in collaboration with like-minded peers Fursaxa, Christian Kiefer, or Espers' Meg Baird and Helena Espvall, Kraus has displayed her comprehensive grasp of English and Appalachian folk traditions, performing with a sparkling clear voice that can sound as ancient and elemental as rain, stone, or soil.

Last year, in addition to her myriad other projects, Kraus contributed a track to the massive UK folk compilation John Barleycorn Reborn, and her current work might be best described by what that collection referred to as "Dark Britannica." On her latest solo album The Fox's Wedding, and with the first album from Rusalnaia, her collaborative duo with Ex-Reverie's Gillian Chadwick, Kraus creates folk music that unabashedly evokes the ancient rites, traditions, and mysteries of pre-Christian England. Her music draws heavily upon the influence of such early music pioneers as David Munrow and his Early Music Consort of London, and so will likely put a portion of its audience immediately in mind of hobbits or BBC costume dramas. Throughout these two albums, however, Kraus and her cohorts are also able to keep themselves fixed in the present, leavening their folk traditions with a healthy working knowledge of past and current underground culture.

With its vivid songcraft and rich instrumental textures, The Fox's Wedding is at once Kraus' most ambitious album to date and her most accessible. Tied intrinsically to the natural world and the rhythm of the seasons, the album represents a song cycle of sorts, following a course of doomed romance (naturally), loss and renewal through a full calendar year. Though all of the songs here are originals, they have the heft and feel of traditional material, particularly as Kraus fills her lyrics with allusions to English pagan folklore on "Robin Is Dead", "Green Man", and "Harvest Moon".
Pitchfork

Tired of the forced "lookit me, I'm so weird!" posturing of the acid folk crowd but still have an itch for the traditional folk forms that were revived and updated during the cross-Atlantic folk revival of the '50s and '60s? Then it's time for Sharron Kraus. A native of Oxford, England who spends a fair amount of time in the states collaborating with American musicians like Alec K. Redfearn and Christian Kiefer, Kraus is Shirley and Dolly Collins melded into one, with big pinches of Anne Briggs and Judy Dyble (original lead singer of Fairport Convention) for good measure. A multi-instrumentalist who plays acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy and banjo just for starters, Kraus has a warm vocal style steeped in folk tradition but blessedly free of the twee affectations that mar some of its lesser practitioners. (You'll never see Kraus singing harmonies with a hand cupped over her ear.) Unusually for someone so traditional sounding, Kraus writes almost all of her own material rather than scavenging through the Child ballads: only "Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes" (a setting of a poem by Thomas Campion) isn't an original lyric. Yet these original tunes are so marvelously simple and unadorned that songs like the delicate opener "Brigid" and the marvelously spooky recorder-led "Robin Is Dead" (which could potentially start a new trend: psychedelic Morris dance tunes!) sound authentically trad. Yet another fine album by one of British folk's most underappreciated new practitioners.
All Music Guide

credits

released March 10, 2008

Originally released on Durtro/Jnana Records.

All songs written by Sharron Kraus, except 8, which was written by Thomas Campion (1567-1620).

Colin Fletcher: upright bass on 1, 3, 11.
Jane Griffiths: violins on 3, 4, 6, and viola on 2, 3, 7.
Nick Palmer: piano on 2, 11, and accordion on 8.
Lucia Simon: recorders on 2; harmony vocals on 4, and viola de gamba on 6.
Michael Tanner: accordion on 5; ebowed banjo on 7, 8, 12, and
steel-stringed guitar on 11.

String arrangement on 3 by Jane Griffiths.

All instruments recorded at home by Michael Tanner and Sharron Kraus.

Vocals recorded by Anna Tjan at Eastcote Studios, London.

Mixed by Anna Tjan and Sharron Kraus.

license

about

Sharron Kraus Oxford, UK

Musical collaborator / songwriter / improviser.
'Pagan radiophonica meets medieval balladry’
'sensual spellcraft’
'Floating freaky fun of the highest order'
'oddly comforting avant-garde masterpiece'
Labels: Sunstone, Ghost Box, Clay Pipe, Feeding Tube, Cardinal Fuzz, Second Language ... more

discography

Birdloom

Mar 2023
K I N

Oct 2022
Swift Wings

May 2022
Welcome to Punkie Night

Oct 2021
Intermission

May 2020
Friends and Enemies; Lovers and Strangers - second pressing

Aug 2019
Chanctonbury Rings

Jun 2019
Something Out of Nothing 7"

Sep 2018
Joy's Reflection is Sorrow

Jun 2018
Time Takes Away

Jul 2016
If You Put Out Your Hand

Apr 2016
Hen Llan Recordings

Feb 2016
Friends and Enemies; Lovers and Strangers

May 2015
Silver Servants

Jul 2014
Winter Songs / Caneuon y Gaeaf

Nov 2013
Music and Migration III

Sep 2013
Night Mare

Aug 2013
Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails

Aug 2013
Yesterday Perhaps: Songs of the Kitchen Cynics

Jan 2013
Folk Songs II

Aug 2012
New Music for Old Instruments

Jan 2012
In the Rheidol Valley

Mar 2011
The Devil in Love: A Soundtrack to the 1772 Occult Novel

Jan 2011
The Woody Nightshade

Nov 2010
Rusalnaia Tour CD

Sep 2008
The Fox's Wedding

Mar 2008
Rusalnaia

Jan 2008
Travellers Two

Jan 2008
John Barleycorn Reborn

Aug 2007
Right Wantonly A-Mumming

Jun 2007
Singing At the Moon

Nov 2006
Leaves From Off the Tree

Oct 2006
Imaginational Anthems Volume 2

Jun 2006
The Black Dove

Mar 2006
The Honeymoon Music Compilation

May 2005
Songs for the Twins

Jan 2005
A Houseguest's Wish: Translations of Wire's Outdoor Miner

Nov 2004
Songs of Love and Loss

Mar 2004
Yuletide

Jan 2003
Beautiful Twisted

Mar 2002

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