I have worked alongside Allie Moss for nearly a year and heard her new album, Late Bloomer, around the end of last year. The album opens with a familiar song, Corner, which was featured on the BT Infinity advert in the UK last year. Her beautiful voice, combined with her gentle acoustic songs, makes it an amazing album that any folk enthusiast can enjoy.

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Traditional folk music was distributed by word of mouth, with musicians trading songs and making other people’s melodies their own. There was no such thing as copyright law. These days, all sorts of media follow the same model, and this video by Andreas Hykade illustrates how the contemporary culture maker can make beautiful new things out of old, recognizable images.

I heard the Hungarian jazz and folk saxophonist — Mihaly Dresch — in Budapest one Christmas and I fell in love completely. I put the CD on and straight away his tone, control and dexterity was enough to make me get up out of my seat and turn the volume way up. I wanted to just be immersed in this music. But aside from his playing, his compositions are breathtaking.

The album, Quiet As It Is, from 2001, is my favourite. Along with his band, they capture something timeless, and for me, otherworldy – the melodies are based on Hungarian folk tunes, but the playing swings and is influenced by jazzers, like Archie Shepp (with whom Dresch collaborated) and John Coltrane. This stuff is really something else.

I don’t know what he’s smoking but I’d be happy to buy him a pack. Singing from the folk side of the fence, Mr. Smolin is a joyous companion to the voices in your head.

Gardening From The Ground Up Part 1 is Houston native Sarah Elizabeth Foster‘s first collection of deeply charged tunes. Filled with raw emotion and wistful reflection, her songs are the product of a vision almost stalled when she was challenged to persevere through the intensive vocal therapy necessary to arrive at what her doctors called a “miraculous recovery” when she was diagnosed with a benign, vocal chord polyp. The record is an unusual acoustic blend of 60s inspired pop, fresh folk and classical motifs wrapped around Sarah’s deep vocals and emotionally rich lyrics. Her Secret Playlist started with the Joni Mitchell song, Both Sides Now [listen below]: ‘The orchestral arrangement of Both Sides Now is so moving, paired with Joni Mitchell’s voice. The intro starts so perfectly and quietly then you immediately grasp her life experience the second you hear her voice. At the 2:40, mark when the horns come in, I always feel my heart swell’. Read the rest of Sarah Elizabeth Foster’s Secret Playlist.

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From the moment you hear her voice, you’ll be hooked. July Flame is the seventh album for Laura Veirs — a former guest contributor to Lost At E Minor — and an album you must have in your collection. Her beautiful voice is so familiar and comforting. Veirs has come a long way from the punk band she was once a part of. The title track, in particular, will make you feel like you’re not alone if you find yourself falling in love with a Peach.

Like their hyperactive creator, Deastro’s songs can’t sit still, hopping from swooning dream-pop to gonzo TV theme songs to whisper-soft folk to crunching robot-rock, and always ringing with Chabot’s earnest tenor. [Read a Secret Playlist by Deastro, where he writes about his eight favourite songs]

Baltimore musician/artist Bethany Dinsick processes haunting folk music through noise methods, running her sparse guitar lines and beautiful voice through loop pedals and samplers. [photo by VJP Photography]

So much of the Baltimore scene seems geared towards day-glo-clad party people, so it’s nice that introspective, country-tinged folk is also well represented here in the form of Noble Lake, a Wye Oak-related project fronted by James Sarsgaard, who I hope won’t mind me calling the second coming of Townes Van Zandt.

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Written during Olney’s Ph.D. in algorithmic algebraic geometry in Edinburgh, Scotland and Clark’s lost months of limbo and relocation from Los Angeles to Texas following the death of his father and grandfather, best friends Grant Olney and Barry DeBakey wrote the songs that would become their self-titled album with hints of Bryter Layter-era Nick Drake and Scott 4 era Scott Walker. But with echoes of McCartney, a la Ram, Lennon circa-Sometime in NYC, and After the Gold Rush Neil Young in their orchestrations.

81 is the first released track from Joanna Newsom’s forthcoming triple album Have One On Me. I had the pleasure of hearing the live preview on Joanna’s birthday at Sydney’s Opera House and was so delighted by this angelic songstresses’ gentle vocals and superhuman harp playing ability. [Click here to listen to Joanna Newsom's 81]

As autumn creeps in, the temperatures drop, and the days get shorter, I’m finding myself listening to more morose and introspective music. Tiny Vipers, a one-woman band from Seattle, has been doing it for me lately with her luminous, bittersweet folk.

Langhorne Slim’s forthcoming release is called Be Set Free and will be out in late September. This track off it, I Love You, But Goodbye, is beautiful, cinematic and cohesive, with gut-wrenching lyrics and a simple but sweet melody. We have it available for free download via the Music Download section of Lost At E Minor.

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A former bare-knuckle boxer from Yorkshire, England (for real), Findlay Brown was heralded by many as the UK’s answer to Jose Gonzales when his debut album, Separated By The Sea, was released on Peacefrog Records in 2007. Love Will Find You moves beyond his earlier folk sound to a more ambitious — and soulful — place. Produced by Bernard Butler (Suede), the album features songs that are lush and intimate, influenced as much by Phil Spector and Ennio Morricone as by Roy Orbison or The Beatles. The album came together while Brown was stuck on his sister’s couch nursing a broken leg, having been run over by a cab driver: ‘I’d already started going back and listening to a lot of records I’d grown up on, like Elvis Presley, soul music, doo wop, Phil Spector, The Righteous Brothers and the like. I had an idea about making a modern record influenced by the songwriting of the late 50s and early 60s. I just started writing, trying to work out what made a universally great song, like Stand By Me. These new songs are the first part of that process’. You can download his new single, Holding Back The Night, for free in our Music Download section.

The man who brought us the masterpiece, For Emma, Forever Ago, is soon to release the follow-up EP, Blood Bank. Given the staggering acclaim For Emma received, his approach to the release must have been a nervous one, weighed down by the expectations of an entire music industry and its league of followers. Blood Bank is no disappointment, though: he calls it a ‘palette cleanser’ after For Emma, and it continues its themes of wintery isolation and introspection. The harmonies on tracks like Beach Baby are beautiful, and the production equally exquisite.

Tallest Man on Earth, the rasping Swedish folk singer-songwriter and one of the unsung heroes of 2008, recently recorded the beautiful song A Field of Birds, a nice adjunct to his summer album release, Shallow Grave. His sound is so loose and unmanicured, and carries a poignancy reminiscent of the rusty, early Bob Dylan.

Yat-Kha are a stunning Tuvan band that combines throatsinging and traditional folk music with straight-up rock. Their album ReCovers is an awesome collection of covers of songs by Led Zeppelin, Joy Division, and Motörhead among many others, reflecting their general approach to music on the rest of their impressive catalog. Despite the modern elements, the Moscow-based group still conjures the vast steppes and endless skies of the small Russian republic in southern Siberia.

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I got a chance to see yet another fantastic Tuvan folk group, Alash, the other night at Barbès in New York’s Park Slope. The tiny performance area was jammed to the point where we had to wait until people left to go to the bathroom to squeeze ourselves in (the show was mentioned on NPR earlier in the day), but it was worth braving the sweltering room and precariously full beer glasses. I appreciated the fact that the band was truly acoustic, not even using microphones, so I could really hear what was going on without the distortion of amplification. The overtones of the throatsinging were quiet, but audible, and one of the igil (horse-head fiddle) players’ kargyraa (deep bass drone produced in the vestibular folds of the singer’s vocal chords) was so incredibly low, people in the room gasped in amazement.

Pink Mountaintops — a wry Canadian duo — are getting some pretty steady exposure on my stereo at the moment, and lots of others judging by their steady rise up the rock echelons. They’ve got that skaggy swagger and well-worked male/female vocal arrangements, particularly on Tourist in my Town, that drew so many people to Velvet Undergound and the other psych-stoner rock bands of that era, and the production is similarly lo-fi. Their 2004 eponymous debut album barely sold until frontman Stephen McBean released the debut album of his other band, Black Mountain, and news filtered out of this little gem. Listen to the song, Rock and Roll Fantasy.

You may have already heard composer Nico Muhly this year on All Is Well, Samamidon’s lovely reimaginings of immigrant folk songs. (If you haven’t, you should). Mothertongue, Muhly’s second album and first for Brassland (run by members of the National), is divided into three acts. First, Glassy Mothertongue features mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer delivering a litany of barely intelligible voices—the aural equivalent of that green Matrix coding. The Wonders suite sets passages from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville to melody, dismantling the tune as it proceeds. Amidon shows up on the Only Tune suite, relating a murderous tale against Muhly’s refractive backdrop. Sure, it’s highly conceptual, but there are enough odd sounds and strange textures to make it accessible even to those who don’t usually venture into composer territory.