Singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside follows up his Northern Ireland Music Prize winning debut album Ephrata, with a brand new EP entitled All Round The Light Said, due out on 29 June via Quiet Arch. Weaving elements of Irish traditional and European folk music with hints of Americana, he creates songs that are understated yet passionate and heartfelt.
The EP features four new songs. In lead-single “A Man Of High Renown”, he blends a joyous waltz complete with air organs and accordions with often violent and disturbing imagery, dealing with the shame of sins committed in childhood; “where the dusty garage floor, along your soft skin tore.”
“Rearranged” has a more straightforward message. A self-confessed technophobe, Burnside deals with the effect of the Internet and social media on mental health in this simple finger-picked ballad recorded at home in Rostrevor.
In “Northern Winds” the full band is recruited to recreate one of Burnside’s most energetic and popular tracks. Recorded on analogue at Analogue Catalogue studios in Rathriland, Co.Down the song borrows imagery from Oscar Wilde, layering multiple vocal lines continuously and repetitively to hypnotic effect.
“Paul” is a return to the electronic experimentation of earlier works, sampling noises from the kitchen for percussion that click and crunch above a harp, distorted organs and vocoder.
A multi-instrumentalist, Burnside plays most of the instruments on the album but was also joined by a number of collaborators and producers with whom he’s worked with over the past few years, most of whom have their own solo projects. These include his brother Connor on drums and percussions, Clark Phillips on bass andSarah Martin on trumpet.
Following the release of Ephrata Joshua Burnside has had a busy year clocking up four million plays on Spotify, with two sell out London shows, appearances at International festivals including Reeperbahn and The Great Escape. He has also had extensive radio play and support from the likes of Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, Tom Ravenscroft, Lauren Laverne, Huw Stephens and Phil Taggart. Joshua performed at theAtlantic Sessions in Portstewart, as well as the music trail for Other Voices in Dingle in December.
He took his band to Austin, Texas to perform at SXSW where he was chosen by NPR as one of the festival highlights – “Burnside’s sound surges with real force… an intoxicating bundle of frayed nerves and woozy intensity.”
Always inspired by his travels around the world, where Ephrata was inspired by a stint in South America, he went to Indonesia in December 2017 to start work on recording his second full-length studio album, due out later in the year.
