MP3: Nick Huggins - The First Letter of Your Name

MP3: Nick Huggins - The Sea Adrift

down in point lonsdale, melbourne, australia, a guy called nick huggins is recording delicate folk music, filling the spaces between acoustic guitar strums with banjoes, found sounds & air. his voice brings immediately to mind another pastoral troubadour / recording wizard from melbourne machine translations, and i wonder how many similiarities can be drawn between them: both of them working in home studios in “remote” locations (look, pt lonsdale is remote if you live in fitzroy or north melbourne), both of them tell fractured folk-ish poetry in immediately identifiable (not to mention sweet) voices, australian accents!, interesting & carefully rendered instrumentation and arrangements. & like machine translations, nick is also involved in something of a local network, recording and collaborating with friends, side projects, et cetera.

anyway, this is something that feels to me uniquely local. but it is also amazing, gentle music, ‘gently’ experimental but with a universal appeal. its intimate without having that intentionally lo-fi shoddiness that sucks life out of so much so-called freak-folk that i think i might otherwise get into. instead there is a careful devotion to the sound of each song. his older material is available to download from his website and he’ll also trade you a homemade cd if you give him “something special” of yours. these two tracks will appear on his next album “shipwreck”, for which he has already worked out a professional marketing plan: “Maybe i’ll leave them all on a train and see where they end up, like those people do with books. Send them off into the sunset.”

machine translations, incidentally, has a new album - his seventh - coming out later in the year.

Nick Huggins website
Nick Huggins MySpace