Les Objets Trouvés

Scottish singer and fiddler Kate Young is an increasingly familiar figure. She was part of the award-winning Songs of Separation project, is one quarter of Carthy, Hardy, Farrell & Young, and she recorded a mature debut solo album, under the name Kate in the Kettle. For this collaboration she has teamed up with French accordionist Raphaël Decoster, who is from Lille. Across all her projects, Young shows herself to be an artist who has the ability to create contemporary folk music that draws from myriad sources and ideas while remaining faithful to a sense of place. There is a mystical feel to Les Objets Trouvés (Found Objects), which, with the exception of one tune – the ancient English song ‘Cutty Wren’ – is made up of new music written by the pair. It's at turns lyrical and explorative. A wonderfully gutsy opening ballad, for example, is followed two tracks later by ‘Mushrooms on the Moon’, a tentative duet on which Decoster and Young seem lost in their own world. It's a pattern that is followed throughout, with dances receding into oblique instrumental sparring.
Young treats her vocals like a third instrument, frequently soaring over the textures underneath, and Decoster's accordion is always busily laying down melodic lines. It's sometimes strange, but always beguiling.