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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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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

– Oscar Wilde

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Fourteenth century France was a place of radical musical developments, particularly in rhythmic structures, polyphony and notation systems. The greatest testament to this style is the Chantilly Codex, a book of music by French and Italian ‘Ars Subtilior’ composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. Containing heart-shaped musical scores and canons set out in 33-bar spirals, this codex is one of the most exquisite syntheses of two artforms: graphic design and musical notation. The experimentation of composers such as Solage) and Trebor (Robert backwards) gave birth to an effervescence of richness and strangeness, a radical pushing of the boundaries of notational complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it has the capacity to connect deeply with contemporary artists; this fleeting and isolated style, in leaving no immediate descendants, retains its perennial novelty and remains forever gilded in mystery.

 

Fred Thomas is currently preparing a recording of this music using contemporary recording techniques and a wide range of strange instruments, both old and new.

 

….more to come….

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“Music is everywhere. Countless radio stations pump it out 24/7. It sells cars, shampoo, drinks – even political parties. Music is always there to cover up a lull in the conversation; it soothes us on take-off and on landing, and it makes us feel good… or does it? Subconsciously we crave for something that goes much deeper: well-crafted, inspiring music with real emotional meaning.

Thankfully, each new generation is blessed with a few young people who embrace music as an art form. They explore, invent, discuss, rehearse, and live their music. What they create enriches and entertains the audience without patronising it.

The artists in the F-ire Collective will give you depth, inspiration, surprise, and above all, hope.”

– Django Bates

www.f-ire.com

f-ire record label