Deep in rural Wales: Samana's rewilded at-moss folk
SAMANA detail self titled 3rd LP
Released 24th May 2024 on their own The Road imprint
Listen to The Knife: https://samana.bandcamp.com/track/the-knife-2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbqd0gURk7Y
https://samana.ffm.to/theknife
Pre-order: https://www.samanaroad.com/samana-shop
On tour in June
An expansive project formed of unbridled love and an unwavering appreciation of the divinity of nature, Samana - the duo consisting of Rebecca Rose Harris and Franklin Mockett - centre their work around a Zarathustran philosophy of removing oneself from the confines of contemporary, societal life in the quest of the awakening of the deep spirit.
Relocating to the deep Welsh countryside over the past few years, such time and artistic maturity is giving rise to a new domain in the work that they create, with an ever-expanding audience citing their live performances through a lens of more of a spiritual, shamanic experience and service of healing than that of just a musical performance. In an increasingly online society, and a frequently fractured world, Samana’s unyielding openness suddenly seems to matter more than ever before
The duos third full-length album, a self-titled collection which reflects the truly personal nature of the work found within. The Samana LP takes inspiration from Rebecca’s dream diary - which she’s kept for more than a decade - and offers an unflinching exploration of the alchemy of grief; a key element underpinning much of her work. It drifts - or perhaps overlaps - the very real world around us while at the same time leaning into those places we perhaps can’t see or feel but know to exist.
The album is led by ‘The Knife’, a stirring lead single that brings together choir-like vocal swells and tempered instrumentation, the whole thing eventually exploding under the weight of pressure, an exhilarating release of noise and energy. “It feels to be a deliverance, a freeing of stored weight and emotion; the confrontation of somatic memory, an invitation for the physical self to shed these feelings stored,” Samana say of the track. “The last section of the song is a complete amalgamation of all these components - it feels to be a sonic representation of a vast mass of water bursting from the containment of a damn, a huge transformative release, like something breaking apart and away from something else, a confrontation, a shedding of a snakes skin.”
Samana acts as a deep dive into the notions of freedom, as well as the magnitude of expansive nature and what it means to live inside of it. Having moved to the deep Welsh countryside a few years ago, Rebecca and Franklin began working on a creative enterprise, turning what was a residential smallholding into an artistic homestead and production house, through the means of traditional building techniques. From replacing the old dairy with an analogue recording studio, and gifting previously grazed land to a nature recovery program, their vision is simple; to create a centre for artistic self-sustainability with the natural world at its core. Immersed in this new lifestyle, bound to a place after years of nomadic transition, Samana began to dig deeper inside themselves than they’d previously allowed themselves to go.
It’s one thing to commit yourself to such a sensitive journey as Samana did at the beginning of this project, it’s something else entirely to see that through to the very essence of what you stand for and to turn those findings into such deeply absorbing songs. It’s something Rebecca, Franklin, and the friends that joined them achieve with unnerving and deeply profound results.
Watch the video for previous single and album track Two Wrongs
Live dates:
June 16th - Newport (Pembrokshire) Memorial Hall
June 17th - Bristol - The Mount Without
June 21st - Brighton -St Michaels All Angels Church
June 22nd - London -Proposition Studios
