Between a breath and a breath

"If you're already on board with BBT and have lapped up Dyble's albums with her Band Of Perfect Strangers, Between A Breath... will be for you. Dyble's aptitude for expressing yearning, hope and whimsicality remains. Longdon's sumptuous arrangements make tracks such as the centrepiece suite France symphonic storytelling in excelsis. But Dyble's own life experience is central, Longdon encouraging her narrative, an older woman's point of view. Tidying Away The Pieces reflects on the loss of a partner; Whisper is the lament of older people fading into society's wallpaper. And Heartwashing... well, given that Dyble sadly passed away before the album's release, when you hear its denouement it might just take away the breaths between your breath".

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"The original female vocalist with Fairport Convention (...), subsequently briefly part of Giles, Giles and Fripp and then one half of Trader Horne, Judy Dyble left the music business in 1973. She went on to work as a librarian before making a surprise guest appearance at Fairport's 1981 annual reunion and began writing and recording again in 2003 ... In 2017 she sang one of the songs on Grimspound by Big Big Train fronted by multi-instrumentalist David Longdon, [which led to the two of them] collaborating on this prog-rock/folk epic, a project which, sadly, has now proven to be her last work ... Featuring both lyricist Dyble and composer Longdon on vocals and autoharp with the instrumentation including 12-string, strings, flute, organ, mandolin, e-bow, harmonium, glockenspiel and much more, perhaps inevitably there are several lines that allude to her illness, but generally speaking, it's a work suffused with optimism ... Over her solo albums, Dyble showed an enthusiasm to experiment with different musical forms and textures as well as the use of often metaphysical, symbolic and expressionist imagery and, while this might not prove the work for which she is most remembered, it's a bittersweet understatement to mark what was and is her finest hour".

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