Review: Frankie Archer, The Folk House – ‘Devastatingly personal and intimate’

Have you ever been there at the start of something new? Something exciting? Something that crackles with possibilities? Have you ever been given a little glimpse of what might be?

Frankie Archer crackles with possibilities; on this, her first tour, she is entirely solo. Just her, a violin, a box of clever samples and a delightful voice.

From those things possibilities drift across The Folk House. It’s like someone’s lifted the lid on a box of smoke, suddenly there are possibilities everywhere.

Up until a year ago Archer was a violinist from the North East, playing traditional tunes, collaborating with all manner of people, but that was a year ago. Right now she’s taking on those traditional songs and blowing into their embers.

Close the Coalhouse Door, the Alex Glasgow song about the effects of mining on the community, shows just what it is that Frankie Archer is doing. It also shows why the likes of Jim Moray and Nick Hart are getting so excited about her.

She takes a moment to ask the audience to hold a note, samples it, manipulates it, then uses it as a droning wash of sound that bouys the song. Suddenly this folk song is devastatingly personal and intimate.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CpM0XTDg3NI/?hl=en

The audience becomes complicit in the music and the storytelling.  As she’s recorded it live, there are whispers and shuffles along with the hum; it is ghostly and mildly terrifying.

Her version of the standard, The Snow That Melts the Soonest, is equally devastating. Here Archer has sampled her own footsteps in a snowy Newcastle and these become the muffled beat. Over this is layered a plucked violin which creates an uncomfortable feeling of dislocation.

There are creaks and snaps of ice, the insistent melting of icicles. All of which would be mere clever trickery were it not for the fact that Archer has a voice to back up all of the technology. It is as simple and pure as the electronics are modern and smart.

A narrative starts to build as the evening progresses. It is one of abuse and the violence that women face in Folk music. For a while the relentless piling up of bodies in the songs seem disconcerting.

There’s the usual roll call of wronged wives, young girls dying in childbirth, butchered sisters and men taking advantage of any woman they encounter. Each song is delivered over spare electronic beats or whispered samples.

In Archer’s hands these stories are bleak and chilling but it is right at the end of her set that they all make a dreadful sort of sense.

An unnamed, self penned song deals with the way that we ignore (or rose-tint) the way women are routinely treated in these old, traditional folk songs. It is brutal, sparse and harrowing. It stills the breath in the room and makes us consider these stories anew.

Considering these stories anew is exactly what Frankie Archer does this evening. Twenty years ago Jim Moray released Sweet England and changed the way that folk music was presented.

Given time, and remembering that this is her first tour and she has no proper releases at all yet, Archer might just do the same. Her possibilities are endless.

Main photo: Barry Savell

Read next:

• Review: Sam Sweeney, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘Charming, delightfully affable and ridiculously smiley’
• Review: Ezra Collect, O2 Academy – ‘An incredibly entertaining spectacle’
• Review: Tom Moore & Archie Moss, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘A sweeping, star-gazing soundtrack’

Listen to the latest Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast: