DISCOGRAPHY :


2005 Apple... New!

2003 Alabaster

2002 Ariel

2000 Alexandria

1996 Argo

COLLABORATIONS

2005 I hear the water...

2005 GHOSTFISH &
Daemonia Nymphe

Louisa John-Krol website or http://www.louisajohnkrol.com/

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References: Loreena Mc Kennit, Kate Bush
October 2005 : 12 tracks

Louisa John-Krol is a fantastic artist, with a voice made of purest crystal,
and a fabulous storyteller.
Her new album "Apple Pentacle" leads us into a fairy world made of various stories flowing mostly from Green Man mythology. The Spirit of the Greenwood roves through the ages as Robin Hood, Egyptian Osiris, Arcadian Pan, Dionysus, Tolkien's Treebeard, Vishnu, Puck, Atho and other incarnations. With cinematic lyris and fairy soundscapes, Louisa's music is a subtle mix of modern production with ancestral themes and instruments (viola, mandolin, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, harpsichord). The result is dreamy fairy pop music with a beautiful, heavenly voice.
Like Kate Bush, she explores the different feelings in her voice: sensual,
sweet, harsh or ethereal, as if her creatures embody her soul. Let's
enter her bewitching worlds.

Tracks :
Atho, The windrow, Which of these worlds?, Spin, Birch Wandering, Escalder's Tree Ride, Canterville, The green Pentacle, Ceracini, Poppet plum, The witch in the wood, Kunmanngur

MP3 : The green pentacle

MP3 : Which of these worlds?

MP3 : Spin

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Review :
The Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang collected European myths and folktales, retold them for a Victorian audience, and grouped them according to theme and, ultimately, color. Australian singer-songwriter Louisa John-Krol has a background as professional storyteller, and like Lang, has found a common theme, stories of the Green Man, and uses this album to explore a cross-cultural archetype, from the English Robin Hood to the Welsh Atho. The wonderfully whimsical package comes with extensive liner notes, including an essay about the appearances of the Green Man in world mythology. It‚s a high concept album that sounds pretensions and self-indulgent on paper.

But John-Krol and her cohorts (husband Mark, producers Harry Williamson and Brett Taylor) attempt to evoke her overarching concept through music. Indeed, the lyrics are impressionistic˜they are snippets of half-told tales and are sung with such delicacy and precision, they are inseparable from the music. LJK's soprano swoops through pieces that meld folk, progressive pop, electronica and new age in inventive and pleasing ways. After an ethereal invocation of the opening 'Atho', the Wurlitzer-heavy 'The Windrow' plays like a vintage Jefferson Airplane piece. 'Which One of These Worlds' begins with Laurie Anderson-like processed vocals before descending into propulsive trance electronica. 'Spin' and ' The Green Pentacle' are medieval folk, with hurdy-gurdy and harp accompanying acoustic guitar. The closing 'Kummanngur'is a drone-filled tribal song that wouldn't sound out of place on a Delirium album. One of the pleasures of this album is how the disparate musical set pieces fit together like a puzzle. You can barely see the joinery between the modern touches (synthesizers, drum machines) and archaic instruments, such as dulcimers, violas and harps.

LJK reminds one of Loreena McKennitt and Kate Bush, and like those women, she‚s a multi-instrumentalist and composer who follows her wild muse wherever it leads her. She does bringer a darker, if not gothic, aspect to her music that grounds her flights of fancy. This dark, dreamy album is the aural equivalent of the fairytale art of Edmund Dulac and Gustav Dore.
--Craig L. Gidney

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Titles : 1 The narm Owl - 2 Conversations between a wolf and a firefly - 3 the hour of fauns -4 Let the Nightsky envelope us -5 cavern of dreaming shelles - the dream of Cydron - the dream of Kalyh - the dream of narwal - 6 the whispering valley - 7a vassel for Michael

MP3 : The narm Owl

MP3 : The hour of Faun

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Review :
Louisa John-Krol has been really active in the first half of 2005. She released her collaborative album with Daemonia Nymphe a couple of months ago and now she's back again with another collaboration with Oophoi. I HEAR THE WATER DREAMING is basically different from "Ghostfish" and if the collaboration with the Greek combo was based on electric ballads enriched by percussions and traditional instruments, this new album sounds more dilated. Thing that reflects that album's title. Each track seems to be focuse on a dreamy state where Oophoi's ambient music meet Louisa's chants. Maybe this is the reason why the project is credited to Oophoi & Louisa John-Krol and it insn't the contrary. The seven tracks (the fifth one is divided into four different movements: "Cavern of dreaming shelles", "The dream of Cydron", "The dream of Kalyh" and "The dream of narwal") are like suites that tend to stop the rhythmical part of music just to create a water like ambience. The effect created is paragonable to a paused movie on a broken video player: the image is still but it is also trembling, it seems to change colors, etc. Try to imagine you taking a nap near a cascade and suddenly you start to hear distant siren's chants. The result is quite relaxing and interesting at the same time but you've got to stop and sit down for a while to appreciate this release.
Maurizio Pustianaz Chaindlk 4,5/5

"Ambient music is like automatic writing; the sounds seem to come from a deep reservoir in the subconscious. The Italian sound designer Oophoi constructs environments— full of oceanic sounds. Drones, altered sounds of nature and subliminal melodies all combine to aural paintings of the depths. Louisa John-Krol listened to a bunch of previously released Oophoi compositions and wrote nascent melodies and lyrics for them. The words are like intriguing, half-told myths; shimmering stream-of-conscious images that dart and dodge like shoals of fish. John-Krol’s silver-toned voice unfurls and drifts through the sonic sea like flotsam. “I Hear The Water Dreaming” is what a collaboration between Kate Bush at her most ethereal and Eno at his most amorphous might sound like. Many of the tracks bleed into each other, but closing angelic hymn “A Vessel for Michael,” a tribute to John-Krol’s deceased father, rises like foam above the water." Craig Gidney - Heathen harvest

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Bewitching, romantic, ethereal pop: whimsy & energy reminiscent of Emilia Torrini, The Moors, Kate Bush. Fairy voice, mandolin, flute, percussion, table harp, charango, piano, lyre, bass, ocarina, clarinet. Luminosity with bursts of progressive rock, ghostly encounters, a tribute to the poet Emily dickinson, Hamlet's Ophelia, a renaissance ballad and dark ambience of Sirens. The mythical basis for this album (and its twin to come) is the union of Persephone and Hades: an embrace between life and death. Featuring the neo-classical band Daemonia Nymphe, Lys, Francesco Banchini (GoR/Ataraxia); ambience of Oophoi; and Olaf Parusel (Stoa).

TITLES: The Throng on the Pier / The Lily and the rose / Waterwood / Stone lake / Me and the machine / Light on the wall / The seventh ingress / paint the wind / How should your true love know? / The search for lost souls- Midnight / Approaching the island of Sirens/ Dancing over Acheron

MP3 : Me and the machine

MP3 :The Seventh Ingress

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Style: Folk-romantic
References: Loreena Mac Kennit
june 2001 - 12 Titles - 45'

Louisa grew up in native Australian bushland. She takes her inspiration in literature, mythology, poetry and Nature. She studied voice, guitar and piano; mandolin was self-taught. During the early nineties, she shared a groupe-house with artists including Dawn Perry, who introduced her to the music of her brother Brendan's duo (Dead-Can-Dance) On Ariel, mandoline, heavenly voices, percussions, flute, cello, string quartet, derbouka... lead us into romantic and dreamy worlds. A masterpiece in the field of romantic pop-ethereal fairy music.

TITLES: Blackbird / Red Balloon / Numb the wren year / Nobelius' garden / Beads of rain / The seagiant / Ariel / Alice in the garden of life flowers / Tale of a thorn / Salamander / Anemone falling / Sentinel


MP3 : Blackbird

MP3 : Numb the Wren Tear

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Style: Folk-romantique
References: Loreena Mac Kennit
juin 2000 - 12 Titles -60'
Alexandria is a realm of dragons and centaurs. Invisible cities of Calvino and Cavafy come to life, with Louisa's own Madame Alchemier and Valley of Seven Keys. Other inspirations are Milton's "Lycidas", Dante's Limbo (Canto IV) where pagan souls dwell, 15th century music of Baixa dansa Barcelona, and novelists Ramon Perez de Ayala, Dostoyevsky, Max Frisch and Shiga Naoya. Engineered/co-produced by Harry Williamson.

TITLES : Alexandria,Contradiction is the Dragon, Hide in your Shadow, Fortress, Talim Ridge, Belarmino's Dictionary, Paper Door, Ariel's Flight, The Valley of Seven Keys, Madame Alchemier, Canto IV, The Last Centaur.

MP3 : Alexandria

MP3 : Hide In Your Shadow

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Style: Folk-romantique
References: Loreena Mac Kennit
juin 2000 - 12 Titles -55'

Argo refers to the legendary ship of the Argonauts. In our age of prescribed mysteries, journeying out of bureaucratised realms is an adventure, whether or not we return with the Golden Fleece. The album celebrates Renaissance alchemist Ficino, Sufis Idries Shah and Ibn Arabi, Sumerian goddess Inanna, authors Dunsany, Blake, Kipling, Walter de la Mare and Holderlin, Celtic faerietales and Greek mythology. Engineered/co-produced by Harry Williamson.

TITLES : Dunsany's Hope, Hyperion, Argo, I'm Not Walking, Little Wanderer, Inanna, Out of The Equipage, Inside the Bubble, House of Legend, Duncan the Fiddler, Oak, Ash and Thorn, The Healer's Names

MP3 : Argo

MP3 : Inanna

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INTERVIEW: (by Nikö d'Obskure.com)

Extract from an interview with Obskure webzine, France 2003:

« Alabaster » foundations are based on positive feelings, like friendship or meetings. But we can perceive a dark surrounding on songs. Do you think that the ambivalence of mankind pushes us to not take simply the benefit of these positive feelings, and that it leads you to transcribe these through your songs ?

How do we delineate foundations or surroundings? Ambivalence haunts each ripple of alchemy, each crack in the marble, each line of laughter or pain, and at the same time illuminates, like the tension of light and shadow in a painting. An earlier song of mine, “Contradiction is the Dragon” explored Ibn Arabi’s notion that when we see a contradiction, we are looking at reality. This might be one way to interpret Alabaster.

For from being monotonous, « Alabaster » leads the listener in many places, but always in the landscape you draw, being very homogeneous. Are you conscious of building a real universe, warm, bright and sometimes sad, as real life is, but in a sort of parallel world ?

Perhaps. I’ve had vivid dreams that feel like visits into a parallel life. They sometimes contain people familiar to me here, but in different situations or guises, and interconnected by threads of recognition, so that I feel they are coming from a universe that’s consistent and convincing. In that world I can fly or swim like a waterbird. Sirens have sung in voices of my sisters. I’ve danced on a chessboard under midnight stars. In one, a friend called my name, his footsteps echoing on a marble floor. Alabaster is a kind of marble, and refers to the Alabaster Chambers of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. A parallel life is touched upon in our song “Light on the Wall” on Alabaster.

Fayries are still breeding this album. Do you think they could evolve with the present world ? Or do you think this stories should be kept in mind, in order to get a proper view on real life ? As they were written by ancients and cross ages, they might carry wisdom ?

Perhaps Faeries are evolving with us, not only as elementals, but also as mischievous companions in our urban activities! And yes, I believe that literary and oral traditions of the Ancients still speak to us.

The packaging of « Alabaster » is wonderful ! Do you have a total confidence in Sabine ? Do you give her the music and then she draws, or the opposite way ?
Yes, I have total confidence in Sabine. Her artwork is one of the reasons I signed to Prikosnovenie, when Frederic Chaplain wrote to introduce the label. Sabine, in my view, wields a mastery of colour to convey emotion and intrigue, while displaying a quirky sense of humour that sets her art apart from more sombre images associated with our scene. Yes, there’s an interplay between music and design, but we respect each other’s independence. Dining in Sabine’s home, I found her as enigmatic and charming as her art.

Louisa's Australian producers:
Harry Williamson:
www.springstudio.com.au or www.farawaymusic.com
Brett Taylor:
www.pilgrimarts.com