C Joynes / Mike Gangloff

Guitarist C Joynes and fiddler Mike Gangloff are a trans-Atlantic duo celebrating the release of their new album “Tom Winter, Tom Spring” with their debut tour of Canada in July 2025.

Their long musical histories have centred on a never-ending search for the otherness that glimmers alike in folk traditions and the avant garde. Their new album, “Tom Winter, Tom Spring” (VHF) emerged from the duo’s UK tour in 2023, when they spent a sunny afternoon recording in Sheffield’s Bishop’s House, a 16th-century Tudor building whose stones and beams seem to bring an extra heaviness to the proceedings. The combination of jaunty frolics (original and traditional), improvisation, and experimental tape noise appeared in 2024 as a limited edition 10-inch lathe on the Sonido Polifonico label. It is now appearing as a full LP on VHF Records, with additional solo tracks from guitar and fiddle.

C Joynes, based in Cambridge, UK, has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar, with a body of work incorporating English folk tunes alongside North and West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical world. He has released 10 albums to date, including “Poor Boy on the Wire” (2021), his first solo album dedicated to the electric guitar; “The Borametz Tree” (2019), recorded with long-term fellow travellers Dead Rat Orchestra; and “The Wild Wild Berry,” a collaboration with singer Stephanie Hladowski (fROOTS Editors Choice Album of the Year 2012, MOJO Top 5 Folk Albums 2012). He has recorded a number of sessions for BBC Radio 3 and has played extensively across the UK, Europe, and the USA, sharing bills with Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Marc Ribot, Richard Dawson, Josephine Foster, Jack Rose, 75 Dollar Bill and many more. He is currently exploring the uses of an amplified archtop guitar, exploiting the instrument’s potential by placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues and the brittle, ringing tones of free improvisation.

“Seek ‘Tom Winter, Tom Spring’ out; cut by two of the most adept artists on the scene mid-way through a tour, the music is fluid and confident, and they manage to balance dense intensity with lighter foot-tappers and spacious abstracts. It’s quite a thing.” – KLOF Mag

Mike Gangloff, who lives in Southwest Virginia, USA, is a founding member of both droney free music notables Pelt and old-time rowdies Black Twig Pickers, both ensembles with decades of performing and recording. In recent years, Gangloff has focused on solo and duo music, touring with Joynes in the UK and playing frequent US shows with cellist Kaily Schenker (Solar Hex) and with guitarist Liam Grant. Last year, Gangloff and Schenker teamed up with 12-string guitarist Jesse Sheppard (Elkhorn) to record and tour as Universal Light. In two recent solo albums, “Evening Measures” (2022) and this year’s “April is Passing,” both on VHF Records, Gangloff has delved into a varied, emotional palette centered on the sounds of the hardanger-style fiddle and octave fiddle, accompanied by Schenker’s cello and by the droning reeds of wife Cara Gangloff’s sruti box.

“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly applied technique.”  – ROB YOUNG, THE WIRE