This is Broken Folk

Percussionist, tap dancer and performance artist Carli Jefferson toured internationally with the physical theatre group Stomp, before meeting non-binary singer and researcher Clair Le Couteur in Prague, while providing percussion for Le Couteur's solo record, New Myths. Evidently, ‘a conversation about what post-apocalyptic folk music might look like’ led the pair to form Lunatraktors in 2017. As that might lead you to suppose, even if their core material is largely drawn from the Irish, English and Australian traditional canon, you would be unwise to expect anything at all closely resembling straight-faced contemporary folk from their debut.

Using only percussion and Le Couteur's four-octave vocal range, familiar ballads are stripped down to their bare bones and re-imagined as what are claimed to be ‘radical, raw takes on Brexit Britain.’ Recorded live with the sounds of boats, gulls and the sea occasionally audible from outside their Ramsgate recording studio, this ever-so-slightly demented music hall/vaudeville and folk mash-up is consistently intense and convincingly disturbing from first to last.