Barney Keen

Harbinger

Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, INDIE / ALTERNATIVE

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Sophisticated songwriting in a classic Brazilian MPB and AOR mode by London’s subtropical transplant, bringing a prevailing warm breeze of his now-native northwest Brazil to burgeoning South London label, Touching Bass

“Multi-instrumentalist producer and songwriter Barney Keen makes music for the long drive and nature’s embrace. Influenced by a dynamic range of styles including Brazilian MPB (having spent time in northwest Brazil, learned Portuguese and written songs on classical guitar), experimental electronic music, folk, soul and other rhythms, it’s clear in Barney’s own creations that he’s not only a lover, but a delicate alchemist of those sonic worlds.

Unsurprisingly, he has found home in other kindred spirits exploring music with a similar curiosity. Having recorded/written with and found fans in James Blake, Lianne La Havas, Ego Ella May, Demae, Sam Crowe, Fred Thomas, Paul White, Kae Tempest and — having stayed at his house during a 2023 trip to Rio, Brazil — Milton Nascimento.

Like them, he masterfully blends the organic with truthful expression. An approach which can be traced back to his youth in the rural southwest of England surrounded by a musical family: “There are scenes of natural places stored permanently in my mind that inform the mood of the music I make. Open spaces, distant horizons, woodlands and big skies”, he notes. “Being out of that environment for most of my life now I find I can conjure up the feeling of it through music.” The proof is all over his 10-track debut album Harbinger, on London-based imprint Touching Bass.

The record shifts both sonically and thematically between blissful imagination and revelations of the day-to-day, and the sharper realities of adulthood. Although pooled together from many different stages of his life, the songs feel energetically bound. Slowly transformed from a makeshift sonic diary of loose memos into ornate arrangements over the course of several years. Barney describes the mission statement as "only that of living and trying to be truthful with the expression”.

LP (Black Vinyl) (0)