We’re so pleased to welcome back the beautiful broken folk duo Lunatraktors on Sunday 15th October!
Lunatraktors rework traditional music with influences from post-punk, trip-hop and queer cabaret. Folk music stripped down to its bare bones to raise the spirits, mixing tonal percussion, tap-dance and harmonic singing with whistles, drones and analogue synth…
“Lunatraktors are simply different. Real in-your-face and incredibly inventive contemporary folk music” – Bernard Clarke, RTÉ Lyric FM (Ireland)
Lunatraktors is a collaboration between artist, choreographer and percussionist Carli Jefferson (she/her), and artist, vocalist and researcher Clair Le Couteur (they/them). The project started in 2017 with the post-apocalyptic question: what’s left when we’ve lost everything? Stripping folk song down to the bare bones, Lunatraktors’ ‘broken folk’ blends Le Couteur’s self-taught overtones and four-octave range with the hybrid of tap dance, flamenco and body percussion that Jefferson developed after touring with STOMP (2001-2004). The pair turned heads when their DIY debut This Is Broken Folk – percussion and vocals recorded live in a viaduct arch by Ramsgate harbour – made MOJO Magazine’s Top Ten Folk Albums of 2019.
Jefferson’s compulsion to dance while drumming prompted Lunatraktors to assemble a tonal percussion kit, providing both rhythm and melody. Added resonances come from Le Couteur’s free-reed instruments, whistles and analogue synth. Reimagining British folk through a shared teenage absorption in jungle, drum’n’bass, triphop, art rock and post-punk, Lunatraktors have built up a passionate fanbase at festivals, galleries, museums, theatres and queer cabarets. A double act in the old fashioned sense, Jefferson’s hyper-expressive performance style meets Le Couteur’s channelled voices of multiple tragicomic characters.
“Awfully beautiful, terribly refreshing, absurdly sad” – François Gorin, Télérama (France)
“A sparse, bravely original style” – Robin Denselow, Songlines (UK)
“Resistance and opposition is core to the release but it’s not delivered drily – there’s dark humour, irony and character” – Nick Barber, Spiral Earth (UK)
