Spafford Campbell: Erasing genre and finding gold in the embers

This is Tomorrow Held, the visionary new project by twenty-something mould-breakers and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell. Eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox.

Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Then know that Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre — and finds gold in the embers.

“Our music reflects our backgrounds,” says Campbell, who grew up in Somerset, the son of a guitar-playing father, listening to a record collection that included Red Snapper, John Martyn and The Dirty Three. He went on to join a post-rock band that channeled Sigur Rós and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, study at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and perform as a sideman to Sam Lee, Sam Sweeney and iconic singer-guitarist Martin Simpson.

“We were raised in the world of the internet so have a vast range of influences,” he continues. “Owen’s fiddle playing has a wonderfully deep underpinning in tradition, which is sort of ever-present, so if we are trying to craft a sound with its own energy, that trad undertone can’t really ever get completely lost. Though despite our differences in musical background we share a common priority, exploring a small, specific idea through a larger lens.”

The two first met as teenaged members of the National Youth Folk Ensemble, a grassroots initiative bringing together talented young musicians from across England to create and perform new arrangements of folk music. The connection, they say, was immediate.

“We realised that we both wanted to push accepted sounds into new territories,” says the Leeds-raised Spafford, whose fiddle-playing skills were encouraged by a local community with roots in Ireland’s County Sligo, and whose commitment to the traditional folk canon is all encompassing.

Born to writer parents — his mother’s extended family also sing English folk songs — he grew fascinated with the drone-based fiddle stylings of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh of Irish superstars The Gloaming. For a while he toured with a vintage village green fair called Giffords Circus.

The duo Spafford Campbell began playing live in 2018, prompting double takes with their delicacy, dynamism and seemingly telepathic exchanges, with the startling intimacy of musical conversations nurtured in improv-led writing sessions.

“I’ve always used traditional music to explore my musical identity,” says Spafford, a nominee for BBC Young Composer of the Year Award and a scholarship student at London’s Royal Academy of Music. “Things changed after we became comfortable playing this exposing music onstage, not worrying about every tiny mistake. Being vulnerable. It felt like a superpower.”

They garnered five-star reviews for their debut album, 2022’s You, Golden, a refreshingly unadorned take on traditional, and traditional-sounding, tunes. In March 2024 came 102 Metres East, an EP digitally released on the Real World X imprint and titled for the recent, scientifically measured shift of the global meridian line from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich through a bin-strewn wasteland. “A nice metaphor for England,” they say.

Because titles came after the music’s creation, preconceptions were avoided. Tracks became what the music wanted them to be. But the album’s cover art — a photo of a derelict Leeds estate by the social historian and early colour photographer Peter Mitchell — spoke volumes.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s Leeds was modernising and many of the city’s older buildings were being left behind. They’d still have discarded clothes strewn about, and exterior walls crumbled to expose peeling wallpaper visible sky. Mitchell’s photos let you feel the decay, the approach of nature; the light coming in. These places have their own vibe.” The choice of artwork dovetails with the duo’s cinematic leanings (“Both of us like slow films with lots of subtexts, where not much happens but everything happens”).

In this way album opener ‘Cooper’ — named after Spafford’s mother’s family — gleams with fragments of Morris dance rhythms as it paves the way into the new release. Its follow up, ‘All Your Tiny Bones’, hits with an electrifying shiver, as Campbell’s languorous vocals drift through a soundscape with energetic flow and rhythmic heft; an otherworld where meteors seem to arc overhead and stillness and presence is found inside musical canyons and rivers.

The album’s first single, ‘MacGill’ (the maiden name of Campbell’s mother), pays homage to the famed creative partnership of American singer/songwriters Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell: “It’s slightly more jazz-influenced in terms of harmony and sound than the other stuff on the record,” says Spafford. “We’re going to that sweet spot at the folky end of jazz.”

‘Look Up’ functions as an interval, a breather, a reminder to gaze at the sky whenever urban life gets too much. An ambient improvisation that evolved fully formed, the visceral clout ‘26’ is even more effective for its pared back simplicity. ‘Tomorrow Held’, the album’s lengthy title track, is an extended tune humid with a sort of desolate joy: “We’re pushing the extreme dynamic by exploring a few small ideas for a prolonged duration of time,” Campbell says.

Spafford nods his agreement. “What begins as something ephemeral and amorphous builds into something industrial sounding then ends with a more traditional feel,” he says. “It contains motifs taken from across the whole album, woven together.”

‘Will’ features a granular effects pedal called the Hologram Microcosm (“Only rarely useful” says Campbell), here deftly manipulated into a glitching loop that elbows its way through hidden banjo stylings and secret fiddle and drum impressions. ‘Four’, the closing track, has a dynamism intensified by the men’s opposing interpretations of where the beat should be.

“I was playing with the beat far behind and Owen was pushing it really far ahead,” says Campbell with a smile. “The intensity we were searching for meant we only had a few takes before I got big blisters on my right-hand fingers, so there’s a real rawness there which is also amplified by the rhythmic juxtaposition of the two parts.”

To listen to Tomorrow Held, with its bold silences and rollicking tones, its layered sounds, inside-out verve and moments placed just-so, is to be present, to absorb. The next day might be on its way. But for now, that’s all there is.