Angels Egg 
The Hand : Berries from The Rubble (F/UK,2009)****
The Hand is the cooperation between Rachael Dadd (who has released a few solo albums before) on banjo, voice, guitar, clarinet, ukulele, harmonium and percussion and Wig Smith on voice, kora, guitar, piano, autoharp and percussion. Not just guitar and kora, but also ukulele/guitar, banjo/kora, and other combinations. That has beautiful finger picking combinations, which occasionally turn the songs into something lullaby-like, while the moods could take you anywhere else. “The Wind Blows the same way” for instance sounds like a travelling folk journey. “Dove Come Rain” with additional harmonium is very descriptive almost filmic music, leading into meditative poetry. Most often instruments like the banjo or ukulele lead the mood a bit more than other instruments. Some of the songs have a flavour of the British Isles, with its subtle rich acoustic folk elements, the stretched over sea perspective and the soft and sweet female vocals working like cooling water, like on “Maroosia, in dual vocals. Here it seems as if the kora is a Celtic harp with a wider range of melodic possibilities. The songs lead equally as much as the fingerpicking evolutions, which hum moodily, and which are like beautiful waters that carry or draw someone into them, drowning him occasionally into a dreamy state, sometimes like a dance inside the head, humming. The song which jumps out most as a song is their beautifully arranged Sibylle Baier song. A recommended album. Please check also out Wig Smith album (just below).
