Caught by the River

Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay: The Hawksworth Grove Sessions

6th September 2018

Today, CBTR favourites Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay announce their collaborative album The Hawksworth Grove Sessions: Duets For 6 & 12 String Guitar, due out on Cambrian Records on 12 October. Listen to ‘Night, Moon, Dance’ from the album below:

Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay both make music so deeply entrenched in a sense of place – such as their homes in Rhayader and Moss Valley – that the landscapes of those environments runs through their records like gushing rivers or rolling hill tops. But what happens when one is removed from such a sense of place? Plucked away from the dark skies, savage weather and isolation of a Welsh town or the community at the heart of a village on the border of South Yorkshire and North East Derbyshire, and onto an open road of hours spent in cars and dining in service stations, when life on tour brings about a new sense of place daily? The answer for the pair was to make a record about it.

“We became really good friends during this time and have spent so many hours stuck in a car together,” Hay says about a self-booked tour that the duo went on together across the UK. When living in Belgium, Ghedi sent his music to Hay and he then released Ghedi’s debut album Home Is Where I Exist, Now To Live and Die on his label, Cambrian Records, in 2015. The pair, whilst both possessing distinct musical personalities and traits, soon bonded through their shared guitar virtuosity and blended exploration of classical and contemporary folk music.

The result is a record that, across ten instrumental tracks, moves from tender, gently plucked guitars that slowly purr to vivacious bursts of energy as the two dash in and out of one another. Whilst the record has the notable input and personality of both individuals, combined they create something new; a flowing, considered and ever-moving record. “That sense of motion and moving through different areas played a role in shaping how things came together,” Ghedi says, with Hay adding: “I think that sense of movement definitely left its impression on the music.” So even when Ghedi and Hay are travelling across the UK and moving from place to place on a daily basis, the pair still succeed in capturing the nature, essence and landscapes of places that some take for granted or simply ignore.

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The Hawksworth Grove Sessions: Duets For 6 & 12 String Guitar is available to pre-order here.