Folk composer and improviser Alison Cotton has announced details of her forthcoming full-length release, Engelchen, which is set to be issued via Rocket Recordings (UK/Europe) and Feeding Tube Records (US) on March 13. The album’s title, which translates as ‘little angels’, refers to its central protagonists, the real-life Sunderland-born sisters Ida and Louise Cook, who used their passion for opera and its artists as a pretext for building networks of liberation, enabling 29 refugees to escape from the grip of Nazi tyranny in 1930s Europe.

The siblings’ remarkable story is mapped out in Cotton’s cinematic string sweeps, the ebb-tide of wheezy harmonium and her ghostly vocal incantations, while Foley recordings of train noises, coastal avian chatter and ominous martial drumbeats transport this beguiling, moving work to its perilous time and place. From the album, comes it deeply poignant first single, ‘The Letter Burning’, a mournful tone poem, with shimmering viola arcos punctuated by insistent crystalline piano stabs, freighted with haunted memories and remorseful feelings located in the not-so-distant past. 

Cotton goes on the road in support of Engelchen this Spring, with dates at Gregynog Hall, Newton (March 23), Glad Café, Glasgow (March 28), The Lubber Fiend, Newcastle (March 29), Bishop’s House, Sheffield (March 30), Rise, York (March 31) and St. Pancras Old Church, London (April 5).      

Alison Cotton’s Engelchen will be released via Rocket Recordings and Feeding Tube Records on March 13