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Jamie Doe and Fred Thomas have been making music together since they were 11 years old.

The Magic Lantern is the musical moniker of British Australian singer-songwriter and composer Jamie Doe, an artist dedicated to examining the limitless depth of human experience in our search for meaning.

To Everything A Season is his unashamedly emotional fifth album written in the months following his daughters birth and his fathers death six weeks later. Describing their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home Jamie says:

“In that cathartic moment I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time where both ends of the circle of life touched.”

To Everything A Season crackles with the quiet intensity of a family’s rawest and most intimate moments. Recorded live over over four days at the legendary La Buissonne studio in France by Gérard de Haro, the sound of To Everything A Season captures a vivid emotional immediacy, the richness of the ensemble arrangements and spirited improvisation belying the devastating songwriting. Working with a septet drawn from London’s thriving jazz scene To Everything A Season is both dreamy and direct, making use of the space around Jamie’s arresting voice to emphasis it’s emotional weight.

Lyrically, To Everything A Season is The Magic Lantern’s most powerful and accomplished achievement, a mature work that establishes Doe as one of the most confident lyricists writing today. With themes of loops and cycles threaded through the album, the lyric draws on references as diverse as the Bible, the records of John Coltrane and the helix structure of DNA.

Born in Australia, before moving to the UK at 12, Jamie adopted the stage name of The Magic Lanternand began writing songs while studying philosophy in Bristol. He lives in London and has released four full length albums and two EPs in addition to a compilation of other artists versions of his songs for the male suicide prevention charity CALM. He has toured the UK, Europe and Australia with acts as diverse as folk singer This is The Kit, Sam Lee, and Alabaster Deplume. He is a Professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and teaches on the songwriting faculty at the Institute for Contemporary Music Performance.

The Magic Lantern has received praise from numerous publications including The Guardian, Songlines, Acoustic Magazine and Folk Radio UK as well as BBC Radio 1’s Huw Stephens, BBC 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction , Night Tracks and BBC Radio 2’s Jamie Cullum, Mark Radcliffe and Bob Harris among others.

To Everything A Season is out via Hectic Eclectic / La Buissonne Records

© Dave Hamblett
© Dave Hamblett
© Dave Hamblett
© Dave Hamblett

“Extraordinary. Beautiful poised singing, amazing lyrics and hypnotic production” Tom Robinson, BBC Radio 6 Music

“Gorgeous, beautiful. This stopped me in my tracks. Slightly surreal, in all the right ways” Jamie Cullum, BBC Radio 2

“Dreamy, beautiful. Something very, very special” Lauren Laverne, BBC6 Music 

“Bitter sweet, beautiful music” Verity Sharp, BBC Radio 3 Late Juntion

“A classic album. I love it!” Bob Harris, BBC Radio 2

“Pretty special i think you’ll agree” Tom Robinson, BBC 6 Music

“Warmly recommended, especially to anyone who thinks meaningful eccentricity and sheer originality are rare commodities in contemporary music” Chris Parker, The Vortex

“Quirky and charming” Timeout

“The Magic Lantern fuse delicate folk flickerings with the depth a richness of a jazz timbre. Their sounds combine to provide a refreshingly deep and mysterious atmosphere, full of imagery….extremely accessible, but in no way due to the following of common formulae” Pejhy

“The Magic Lantern’s set was a heightened sensory experience that contained all of the dramatics of a piece of theatre. There is a certain Jeff Buckley quality to the arrangements and diction, a songwriting capacity that, like Joanna Newsom’s, is utterly otherworldly and densely descriptive….a symphonic fuzziness to the band’s sound in which the instrumentation intermingles to create an overwhelming experience” Folk Radio Live Review

“They’re making bold, heartwrenching (and still bloody clever) songs” Neu Magazine

“9/10 – Something quite special, The Magic Lantern have produced a remarkable, enchanting and genuinely affecting album that’s sure to bring them the attention they deserve” Planetnotion.com

“An 11-Track Stunner. There’s no real way of putting this in a subtle manner, so it’s better to be blunt and open about it from the off – ‘A World in a Grain of Sand’ is a must-buy” Clixie.co.uk

“**** Beautiful, engrossing music” musicOMH.com

“4.5/5 – Wonderfully composed” Sound Revolution.com

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Fred Thomas has been collaborating with Albanian/Swiss singer Elina Duni since 2017. Their album ‘Lost Ships’ was released on ECM Records in 2020, featuring Rob Luft, Mathieu Michel and Fred Thomas. Their second album together, ‘A Time to Remember’, was released on 2023 on ECM, recorded at La Buissonne Studios by legendary engineer Gérard de Haro.

Elina Duni – Vocals
Rob Luft – Guitar
Mathieu Michel – Flugelhorn
Fred Thomas – Piano and Drums

Buy or listen to ‘Lost Ships’.

Buy or listen to ‘A Time to Remember’.

Born into an artistic family in Tirana, Albania, in 1981, Elina Duni made her first steps on the stage as a singer aged five, singing for National Radio and Television. In 1992, after the fall of the communist regime, she settled in Geneva, Switzerland, with her mother, where she started studying classical piano and thereafter discovered jazz.

© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska
© Monika Jakubowska

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As part of his research into the music of J.S.Bach, Fred Thomas has delved into the world of the organ. Electrofeit is an album of J.S. Bach solo organ music released by music publisher and record label The Silent Howl. This was followed by ‘Cut From Air‘, released in 2023.

“In a word: sublime” SilenceAndSound

Some words on ‘Electrofeit’:

There were several sources of inspiration for this recording: a sudden love affair with church organs, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Glenn Gould’s obsession with technology and how it relates to classical music. Then I heard some lectures by the historian Hayden White that seemed relevant to the interpretation of art from the past. His ideas are a gift to anybody interested in period performance practice.

Here are some of Hayden White’s thoughts (paraphrased):

–  How can a creative student of the past use imagination to supplement the kind of knowledge, always fragmentary, always incomplete, often hidden, that historical methodologies dig up? Is there an essence that you can derive from a combination of so-called scientific enquiry and poetic imagination, without transforming fact into fiction? In fact, what is the status of fact and fiction? Can they even be clearly demarcated?

–  History can be an artistic treatment of reality. Novelist Toni Morrison says her book ‘Beloved’ is “historically true in essence, but not strictly factual”.

– Literary devices such as the anecdote or epigraph are instruments for treating the past artistically, for interpreting facts poetically, for drawing attention to your message by giving it formal coherence. Form articulates or even enacts message. These literary devices are poetic precisely in so far as they draw attention to their own processes of production. They tell you something about the text itself.

– To tell things chronologically results in a chronicle. To relate a history you must violate chronology, and it’s this that gives it narrative force. Why do we want a narrative or story? Because identifying the structure that holds events together in a particular pattern of cause and effect or functional relationship is not enough; the dramatisation of events is key i.e. to separate agents into protagonists/antagonists, strong/weak, agents/patients and thus extract meaning.

All of this relates deeply to recording music of the past. 
In the case of ‘Electrofeit’, I recorded the fugues by over-dubbing (multi-tracking) the voices. Starting off by recording a whole fugue with all its voices, I then replaced each voice individually, finally removing the original template from underneath – a bit like drawing on tracing paper on top of an original.

This ‘device’ tells the listener how I feel about the text. It draws attention to itself, through technological tricks such as panning, distance, eq and timbre. It dramatises the music by separating the voices into their ever-changing roles of protagonist or antagonist, leader or follower. And the device itself enacts the polyphonic nature of the music.

All of this might be vaguely true…

Press:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/kbng9v/fred-thomas-is-bringing-bach-into-the-21st-century

“These pieces take on a deep and magical dimension…each detail revealed in overwhelming relief thanks to quality sound recording and mixing, supported by an interpretative finesse that brings to mind the contemporary and subtle games of a Glenn Gould. More than yet another standard interpretation of the works of J.S. Bach, ‘Electrofeit’ is a brilliant renewal of his work’s modernism, a wonderful bridge between past and present, a moment of auditory peace and contemplation. In a word: sublime” SilenceAndSound

“Fred Thomas…is utilizing modern recording and post-production technologies to create unique compositions and reinventions of traditional classical music. By utilizing this kind of creative experimentation and exploring the realm of multi-track recording, Thomas is challenging the status quo of the classical music genre…Electrofeit is…a creative product and work of art wholly his own. Just as Brian Eno considers himself a composer beholden to the studio and constantly evolving recording technologies, Thomas is now pioneering this methodology in the classical genre. Electrofeit has a sound that is both more full and resonant than typical Bach recordings, with a sonic depth that can only be paralleled in music and film genres outside of the traditional“ The Creators Project

Click here to read the whole article.

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Fred Thomas works regularly as Musical Director with Shakespeare’s Globe. He was MD for the Globe’s worldwide tour of ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in 2016, as well as ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Twelfth Night’ & ‘Titus Andronicus’. Other productions include the National Theatre’s “Pericles’ and the Globe’s ‘After Edward’. Fred has collaborated with, amongst others, Emma Rice, Michelle Terry, Nina Steiger, Nick Bagnall, Jude Christian and James Fortune.

“Launce is a particular delight, especially in her interactions with multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas who she claims as her dog Crab” inthecheapseats.co.uk

 

 

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Multi-instrumentalists Ruth Bruckner and Fred Thomas met in Tuscany in 2019, immediately connecting through their love of medieval music and in particular the viella. Performing on combinations of strings, recorders, prepared piano, tenor banjo and voice, their duo is dedicated to recording experiments, the Chantilly Codex, Bach, song-writing, extended techniques and free improv. Their first release is an exquisite madrigal composed by the medieval composer and theorist Paolo da Firenze.

Buy ‘Un Pellegrin Uccel” on Bandcamp here


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Born into the great line of Kouyate Griots in southern Senegal, Kadialy plays original songs inspired by his traditional repertoire. Kadialy and Fred have been playing together for over 15 years, with Kadialy on kora and vocals, and Fred on double bass.

“Senegalese kora virtuoso/singer Kadialy Kouyate showcases his fleet-fingered skills on this mesmerising instrument, complementing it with his hauntingly, darkly beautiful voice, to create a Toumani Diabate-meets-Youssou N’Dour sound.” Time Out

© Emma Werner