Second album from multi-instrumentalist Fohn (Tom Connolly), following 2024's Seanteach. Tom is also one of five members of Quade (AD93). Their second album, The Foel Tower, was released in 2025 to widespread acclaim. He is also a member of the upcoming meditative folk group Twelfth House. Fohn conjures a dreamlike landscape of introspective beauty, loneliness and transience from analogue tape and field recordings on the new album, Porcelain. A late summer evening in southern France. The dry mistral wind billows the washing that hangs outside the windows on narrow streets, bringing with it the first whispers of autumn. In the distance, children are playing in the square, their shouts caught in the dust whipped up by their feet. A bell tolls, the light dies, and a rich, compelling solitude descends. Violinist and multi-instrumentalist Fohn, aka Tom Connolly, describes the act of making music as "building fictional environments that become places of solace," and a process of translation and projection that bridges his internal and external worlds. While musicians like John Also Bennett, Oren Ambarchi and Connolly's own group Quade drift behind his sound, Porcelain draws its temperamental inspiration from films like Call Me By Your Name and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, as well as the sculptures of Antony Gormley, whose solitary figures stand isolated in expanses of water along the UK coastline. How does Connolly describe the atmosphere he wants the music to evoke? "It's the feeling of the inevitability of something having to pass," he answers. "It's compelling because it's fundamentally unattainable. You're searching and grasping for something that you can never fully hold." A moving, intimate and deeply personal album, Porcelain shimmers in the elusive light of melancholy. For Connolly, it provided the release of catharsis, but it's a feeling that will mean something different to everyone who listens. FFO: Oren Ambarchi, Milkweed, Shovel Dance Collective, Daisy Rickman, Tara Clerkin Trio and Flaer.
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