Latest Featured Artist

SPELL SONGS/LOST WORDS

Album: In Tihin Air

Release Date: 4th September 2026

Musical style: Folk

Folk by the Oak first commissioned this stellar collection of seven

acclaimed Folk and World musicians - Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis,

Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim

Molyneux - to collaborate on the Spell Songs project back in 2018.

What started out as a 1-album project cohered into a close-knit band

with its own generous group dynamic that allowed music to flourish.

As with their first 2 albums (The Lost Words Spell Songs, and Spell

Songs II, In Thin Air is an homage to a collaboration by award winning

artist Jackie Morris and renowned conservation author Robert

Macfarlane. Released to widespread acclaim on 7 May, The Book of

Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a

clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky. Both the

book and Spell Songs’ new album are creative responses to the great

thinning of our skies.

A reimagined birding field guide to wonder and loss, the book seeks to

identify and also identify with the birds within its pages. Throughout

Jackie and Robert’s book there runs a gentle mantra on The Seven

Wonders of Bird – Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration,

with seven chapters celebrating 49 birds all on the RSPB’s Amber or

Red list.

Intrigued by this concept, the Spell Songs musicians have developed

an intricate new album that has an overarching narrative, capturing

the remarkable world of birds from nest to migration. In Thin Air seeks

to deepen the connection between us and our precious birdlife, to

bring them into focus. After all, they inhabit “…our languages and

stories, our art and folklore, and our individual and cultural memories”

(Karine Polwart). And as Rob writes, “Without them, things start to fall

apart”.