EP: 'Things We Learned to Live With' 

Out 4/11/2020.

‘Things We Learned to Live With’, a Neo folk ep, recorded over the course of a year by Danish-born, Glasgow based artist Asthmatic Harp aka. Songstress Hannah Fredsgaard- Jones. It’s the sound you’d expect from a perfect sonic marriage between Joanna Newsom’s wonderfully strange sound world and the soothing, pure tones of Laura Marling.

Recorded by Asthmatic Harp solely in the best DIY manner, mixed and mastered by Sam Smith in Glasgow’s Green Door Studio, these are songs you’ll hear one day and still be humming a week later. They are eclectic and inescapable with Hannah’s emotive vocal, delicate acoustic guitar, with clarinet gently weaving in and out between subtle synthesisers, percussion and tinkling piano notes.

"This intimate, poetic and colourful collection of tracks feels like taking a serene trip across a lake in a little row boat on a sunny day. (...) it consistenly evokes a folksy sense of calm and wonder." -Music I'm Obessed With

Single: 'Five day Forecast' 

Out 9/9/2020.

The song is a rich folk flower carried by emotive vocal and a delicate acoustic guitar with a character full bass clarinet gently weaving in and out between  subtle synthesisers, percussion, tinkling piano notes and the sound of rain. It is like a perfect sonic marriage between Joanna Newsom’s wonderfully strange sound world and the soothing, pure tones of Laura Marling. 

Five Day Forecast meditates on the unpredictability of the weather and twists life sometimes takes like sudden Pandemics and drone sightings over airports. It forecasts stormy weather and “strong winds soon to batter Britain again” which, for a song that was written pre-Covid-19, reverberates with an unnervingly accurate prediction of what was coming. “Do you have to rush round’ to succeed?”, Asthmatic Harp sings reflecting on how our busy lifestyles and toxic productivity might just make us miss out on life’s simple pleasures like an interesting conversation with a stranger at a junction waiting for the lights to change.

“I wrote Five Day Forecast after a number of experiences of strangers approaching me in surprising ways in public spaces. There was the cyclist who pulled up next to me at a junction, asking me if I was ready to crash out of the European Union or the chap on the tube who started telling me about his girlfriend who was part of a circus troupe”

Single: 'Limbo' out now

My new single Limbo is out on 29th July 2020. The song is a quirky-catchy indie folk song based on a poem by Manchester-based queer writer and performer Roma Havers. The song is an up-lifting indie statement driven by guitar and vocals, synth, piano, percussion and clarinet interwoven in a playful patchwork of rhythmic poetry.

Roma Havers and I met the first time in the basement of a Nottingham pub where we were both performing at a Spoken Word event.

“When I heard Roma perform her poem Limbo I was completely blown away. It was strong, raw and fragile all at the same time and I knew that I had to put music to it. After swapping a ‘CD for a poetry zine’ I hunkered down in my North London flat and straightway wrote the music.”

The poem itself was written in a week, mostly overnight in a bath in Hull (it was one of those days). Limbo balances on a knife edge between ‘I need you’ and ‘I don’t need you’. It portrays the dizzying limbo between comfort and pain in a break-up between lovers.

Single: 'To The Boats' out now

To The Boats is out on 3rd June 2020. The song is a warm and nostalgic duet with Singer-Songwriter Sophie Kilburn. The instrumentation is sparse and earthy with autoharp and ‘First Aid Kit’-inspired harmonies with a ghostly layer of incidental sounds leading the imagination towards a dark lake in a lush Summer forest.

“I wrote ‘To The Boats’ in the summer of 2019 in a Welsh chapel. The lyrics came together like a jigsaw puzzle whilst searching through titles of books that covered the back wall.” 

‘To The Boats’ follows my latest single ‘Bird of Paradise’ that was aired on Tom Robinsons After Hours show on BBC6 Music. The release preempts the EP, ‘Things We Learned To Live With’, that is planned for release in Autumn 2020. The EP is a collection of intricately arranged contemporary folk ballads, sharing musical language with artists such as Regina Spektor, This Is The Kit and Laura Marling.

Single Trilogy: Royal Mail (2017)

2/3: Moorgate 

MOORGATE can be described as Scandinavian noir taking inspiration from popular TV dramas such as the Killing and the Bridge. The single is accompanied by a thriller-like video set in a surreal animated universe that takes us to crime scenes around London.

“On my daily commute to Moorgate station I would entertain myself reading the free newspapers. I was horrified by the number of blood grippingly detailed crime stories reported from in and around London. I soon realised the absurdity in sitting on the tube becoming numb to the dramatic reality of those stories while spending my evenings watching TV crime dramas such as The Killing and The Bridge.”

Single Trilogy: Royal Mail (2017)

1/3: Kilburn (2017)

KILBURN is the first single of three from Asthmatic Harp’s new conceptual song collection, Royal Mail. The three songs are named after London Tube stations, carrying the titles:

Kilburn, Moorgate and Seven Sisters.

The songs are written as letters that encapsulate the stories and atmospheres evoked by the chosen Tube Stations.

The release offers melodic pop songs in an imaginative universe of string and clarinet arrangements, sampled toy pianos and an old record player in a Welsh chapel. The music is playfully strung together around Hannah’s stunning and evocative voice.

“There is something special about the handwritten letter. I think it is incredible thinking about all these envelopes that are lying in a red box until a postal company picks them up. I find it similar to all the music in cyberspace just waiting to get downloaded. I can reveal that the Danish postal service isn’t known for being particularly efficient so I really do hope that my musical letter, Kilburn, will reach you!” 

EP: Lost Astronaut (2015)

LOST ASTRONAUT is based on a childhood nightmare that transformed the shadows of the night into aliens and turned sleep into involuntary space travel. At the turn of millennium people revelled in conspiracy theories and doomsday speculations. In the schoolyard, kids exchanged pulp fiction about distant galaxies and at the local library a young girl consumed science fiction novels, one after the other.

Daydreams flickered through the children’s imaginations, morphing into nightmares about being selected for a space mission — one that goes fatally wrong, flinging the astronauts out into the infinite universe.

The five songs of the EP explore the fundamental, existential anxiety and angst caused by the feeling of being a “lost astronaut” in a world that at times can feel incomprehensible and meaningless.

LOST ASTRONAUT gives voice to the anxieties caused by life’s endless search for meaning, and expresses the poetic beauty that emerges when facing the unknown, the incomprehensible.