Enclosure

The Askews have released some of the most striking folk music of recent years, from Hazel's involvement in Lady Maisery and Coven; Emily's folk-meets-early-music album Alchemy, her fiddle trio Alma, and work for Shakespeare's Globe; as well as their three albums as a duo, including the Spiral Earth Best Traditional Album of 2015, In the Air or the Earth.

Enclosure takes its themes from the land enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, and is a metaphor for disconnection, captivity, place and power in the present age. The opener, ‘I Wandered by the Brookside’, focuses on internal disconnections while ‘Goose & Common’ tackles the privatisation of place and resources. A lovely account of ‘Georgie’ is bound up in the social enclosures of class, while ‘My Father Built Me a Pretty Little Tower’ (a variant of ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’) and ‘Castle by the Sea’ both explore the enclosures of gender, power, life and death. The closing ‘Moorfields’ is a Bedlam song, voiced by a woman incarcerated for love across class divides, complete with errant floating verses – from outside the enclosures of the song – that cast a new dimension and even a glimmer of freedom and hope.