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LP
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ODA 009LP
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$30.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 9/11/2026
Fohn conjures a dreamlike landscape of introspective beauty, loneliness and transience from analogue tape and field recordings on new album, Porcelain. A late summer evening in southern France. The dry mistral wind billows the washing that hangs outside the windows on narrow streets, bringing with it the first whispers of autumn. In the distance children are playing in the square, their shouts caught in the dust whipped up by their feet. A bell tolls, the light dies, and a rich, compelling solitude descends. Violinist and multi-instrumentalist Fohn, aka Tom Connolly, describes the act of making music as "building fictional environments that become places of solace," and a process of translation and projection that bridges his internal and external worlds. While musicians like John Also Bennett, Oren Ambarchi, and Connolly's own group Quade drift behind his sound, Porcelain draws its temperamental inspiration from films like Call Me My Your Name and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, as well as the sculptures of Anthony Gormley, whose solitary figures stand isolated in expanses of water along the UK coastline. How does Connolly describe the atmosphere he wants the music to evoke? "It's the feeling of the inevitability of something having to pass," he answers. "It's compelling because it's fundamentally unattainable. You're searching and grasping for something that you can never fully hold." A moving, intimate and deeply personal album, Porcelain shimmers in the illusive light of melancholy. For Connolly it provided the release of catharsis, but it's a feeling that will mean something different to everyone who listens.
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LP
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ODA 004LP
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Fohn brings connection, displacement and new identities into the moment, on pastoral debut album Seanteach -- informed by island life, marine folklore and musical tradition. Connection to the land, the severing of earthly ties, explorations of environment, mythos and generational memory: under the moniker of Fohn, English violinist and producer Tom Connolly takes to the fiddle on which he learned his craft as a child. Forging new bonds with his family's island home off the coastal west of Ireland, their story is retold in Seanteach (Irish for 'old house'), released on Odda Recordings. Each track on the album is a reflection of aspects of that relationship to island life -- where physical features intersect with mythology. Such as, "Boreen," named after a colloquial term for rural byroads sometimes shared with otherworldly neighbors. "Aisling at Sea" draws on the primal, unstoppable momentum of the water, while the folklore of "Immram" reflects on generationally-kept tales of marine bravery and supernatural accomplishment. "The compositions often sit at the fraying edges of memories I've inherited from my own experiences," says Connolly, "that of family lore, or from stories that I have come across. I wanted the compositions to tread the space between documentation and fantasy that feels so reflective of my relationship with this place." Tying these worlds together is the presence and memory of Connolly's "Mamó" (Irish for 'grandmother'), Bríd. Despite passing during Connolly's childhood, this "larger-than-life character" shaped his imagination with anecdotes and stories, representing both a familiar figure, and the poignancies of potential and regret. "Between the Shoreline and the Gorse" channels her early childhood, born to a large Catholic family in the island's "Seanteach," and cast adrift from her old life -- a severance of ties that Connolly attempts to make ethereal amends for, with the album named for her family home. "It's something that feels so visibly prominent in Connemara with its landscapes charcoaled with deserted ruins. It's a feeling I also experience, despite never having lived in Ireland, which prompted me to want to explore the idea of longing for something/somewhere 'un-experienced', and to a certain extent, fictionalized."
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