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Concessions: £10
SARAH SMOUT
Sarah is a cellist-singer and activist, creating music and poetry deeply rooted in nature and place. Her music has been played on BBC Radio 2, BBC Look North, and has been used for environmental campaigns by Greenpeace, COP26 and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Prior to her solo career, she toured and recorded internationally with renowned artists such as Michael Chapman, Bridget St John, The Mediaeval Baebes, Gren Bartley, King Creostoe, The Magpies and many more. This led her to appear at many mainstream and folk festivals across the globe such as Primavera Sound, Shambala, Greenbelt, Cambridge, Green Man, Larmer Tree, and Folk Alliance International.
More recently, Sarah’s music video ‘Atlas’ was featured at COP26 as part of the IUCN Peatland Pavilion, with the aim of creating awareness about Yorkshire’s fragile and important peat bogs. ‘Atlas’ also received airplay on the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show (“deeply lovely” – Mark Radcliffe), was featured on BBC Look North and COP26tv. Her collaborative work with environmental organisations has also seen her providing Greenpeace with a Save the Arctic anthem in 2017, and teaming up in 2021 with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to create music videos in the wild for an ongoing project called Wild Music. This project will feature more single videos to be released in collaboration with YWT, filmed in different environments.
Further to this, in 2021 Sarah was commissioned by the Ensemble Team at Lancaster University to write a theme song for their “Entangled” Festival. Using their environmental research as inspiration, she wrote and recorded a song-poem called ‘Sinking Sand’, and filmed a music video at Heysham Head near Morecambe.
Sarah also draws inspiration from places that are remote and offer alternative lenses with which to view our connection to nature. In 2018 she travelled to Iceland by boat, via Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes, in order to collect natural sounds and songs from each island to make into a sound-map. These experiences have culminated in an entrancing solo show that explores human relationships with nature, climate change and sense of place through music, poetry and spoken word. Sarah’s solo performances are imbued with visceral story-telling, bristling with atmosphere created with looped cello, haunting melodies and deeply felt lyrics. Audience members are left feeling transported and mesmerised, with sounds and rhythms that are never too far from the sea.
In 2021 Sarah performed at Hinterlands Festival and at Manchester Folk Festival/English Folk Expo supporting Sam Lee at the RNCM. 2022 will see her perform at Timber Festival, Just So Festival and more TBA.
NATALIE HOLMES
Self-managed, Natalie has been taking her career with both hands and lifting all she can carry. From booking numerous headline tours herself, arranging support slots with the likes of Gabrielle Aplin, Ásgeir & Sam Brookes, festival slots including Isle of Wight, Live at Leeds & Barn on the Farm, to early on securing her first major sync with ice cream brand Breyers, the now 27 y/o musician has learnt a lot about navigating the industry alone. In her hometown too, Natalie has gained respect and admiration after multiple performances at Bristol Harbour Festival & Dot to Dot, alongside longstanding support from BBC Introducing in the West.
Focusing more on singles over the past few years, her song ‘Hideout’ received attention from Radio 2, Clash Magazine & Record of the Day, with Clash describing it as “an inspired return from a songwriter we will enjoy watching develop over the coming months and years”. As she writes more and more, Holmes knows she has more than enough material for an album or 3, but says she’ll ‘know when the time is right’. In the meantime, she continues to release in small chunks, exploring genres and writing in as many corners as she can, including production music for The Firm Music Group & Audio Network.
Stemming from her need to spread an uplifting energy through music, Natalie started taking the live streaming world by storm when she started regularly broadcasting hours of on-the-spot inspired creativity on Twitch in late 2018, alongside starting her Patreon page where she uploads original self-produced demos every month.
Her latest project ‘Songs I Made When The World Changed’, sees her manifest the confidence to officially release a body of work produced & mixed entirely by herself. The lead single ‘Dandelion’ was aired on BBC 6 Music by Tom Robinson.