Tunng

Tunng are riding an electric horse at the forefront of the new wave of folk. Melding the gentlest pastoral folk to samples and quirky electronica they define 'psych-folk'.

Musically they bring guitars, percussion and beats together in a melting pot that some describe as 'twisted-folk', 'nu-folk' or even 'folktronica', but in reality is far less radical than any of those epithets suggest. Lyrically, think of an English Jack Kerouac at his beat dharma elegiac best, delivered in a mesmerising murmur. Put simply, their sound draws you in and chills you out. tunng tunng

They draw some inflections from the Summer Of Love vibe that The Eighteenth Day Of May have immersed themselves in, but in a less heavy, more ethereal way. Their songs are more leisurely affairs that deconstruct the traditional folk song sound and re-assemble it in the modern recording studio. Snatches of sampled dialogue nestle amongst guitar chords pared back to their barest essential, everything you think wouldn't work, but does.

Their web site has copious free downloads, some video and of course their MySpace page has some tracks to whet your ears.

This 'new wave' of folk/electronica has been pounced on by the media as a zeitgeist event, and festivals such as The Green Man have bills bursting with such talent. But there are naturally precedents to such developments - Martyn Bennett, who sadly died in 2005, produced several albums that radically re-defined what constituted 'folk' or the wonderfully vague term 'world music' could or should be. Tunng create a brew of folk infused with edgey ambient electronica, it's inevitable development in the 21st Century.

The fact that the hallowed land of Trumptonshire lives on in their recordings will mean so much to some, yet nowt to some others...