Ashley Hutchings - Ninety-Nine Impressions

Ashley Hutchings, the man behind Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, The Albion Band, among many other guises and also known in the folk world as The Guv'nor releases a very different album of spoken word along with music by Blair Dunlop, Jacob Stoney and guests Ruth Angel and Sid Peacock.

This will be the man's 99th album release and will prove to be something to remember.

NINETY-NINE IMPRESSIONS

A selection of poems and poetic prose, acoustically accompanied.

In short, it is an audio anthology, but it's also a creative mosaic of cogent quotes and apposite well-expressed observations, an audio version of that fascinating verse form, the cento. Poetry and prose, script and transcript are significantly threaded alongside his own writing: an accomplished poet himself.

Blair Dunlop and Jacob Stoney provide background. The range of styles is impressive, embracing jazz, classical, rock, traditional, and even musique concrete. What Blair and Jacob and the other guests, Sid Peacock and Ruth Angell contribute is neither accompaniment nor setting but rather a musical context like the occasional fragments of archive, ambient audio which haunt some of the readings - Nigel Schofield