Three powerfully beautiful works feature on the latest release from the Louth Contemporary Music Society, all composed for the 2024 LCMS midsummer festival. The music is various, but all of it haunting. All of it, too, creates a deep atmosphere of  stillness.

Cassandra Miller's The City, Full of People surrounds you with voices echoing from out of the sixteenth century, bearing memories of plaintive church music by Thomas Tallis.

From Laurence Crane, whose music is at once elementary and extraordinary, comes a string quartet that has one ear on the great quartet repertory and the other on the mouth organ.

Then the choir comes back for Linda Catlin Smith's Folio, translucent and strange, finding music for the stray ventures towards poetry that Emily Dickinson jotted down.

The collection joins a sequence of LCMS recordings that have been widely acclaimed. Linda Catlin Smith's earlier Meadow for strings, released as an EP, was chosen by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as one of the notable recordings of 2020. Steve Smith got it right: "a timely gift of easeful beauty".

"'Folks' Music' is a credit to Eamonn Quinn and his Louth Contemporary Music Society in Ireland, which commissioned these works and created this superb album." - The New York Times

"Music this uncalculatedly beautiful leaves you almost desperate with gratitude." - The New Yorker