Artist: Mirrored Daughters
Title: Mirrored Daughters
Format: 12” black vinyl
Cat#: Fika106LP
Release date: 21st February 2025
Bandcamp | Spotify
Fika presents Mirrored Daughters - an album of lo-fi folk-pop and explorative woodland meditations from members of Firestations, The Leaf Library and Marlody. Bright-eyed, melodic music inspired by travels in Epping Forest as much as it was by spontaneous collaboration, these 11 tracks deliver an intriguing journey through (and beyond) the forest - crystal clear melancholy interspersed with benign drone rituals.
The music on their self-titled debut takes a step away from the widescreen production of the artists’ other groups and instead revels in the instinctive, warm tones of acoustic instruments; guitars, cellos, clarinet, a harmonium and bells providing the earthy sonic environment for these spacious songs.
Starting out as quickly-recorded acoustic guitar and bass pieces by Lewis Young (Leaf Library drummer) they were then taken up by Mike Cranny (guitarist and singer in fellow Walthamstow travellers Firestations), cellist Hannah Reeves and additional Leaf Library member Matt Ashton. Each added parts remotely, engineered in their home studios, before singer Marlody brought her crystalline voice to the music; layered harmonies and twisting, looping phrases that tie the story together.
Alongside these sketches were Lewis’s trips to the forest with a train of bells and a battered old violin, all dragged through mud, fallen leaves and brambles to create otherworldly yet natural sounds - music that sounds like it’s sprung from the forest floor. Lewis likens this ritual to “uncovering music that’s always been… a summoning of spirit folk, used to appearing in autumn, taking a pilgrimage through forests with joy and frivolity. A Miyazaki-meets-Chaucer kinda vibe.”
While the music is inhabited by these eerie and historic landscapes - camps, iron age forts, the folklore and the golden atmosphere of autumn - the lyrics speak to more personal (if occasionally abstract) concerns, both revelling in the escape enabled by the forest and worrying about the encroaching city at the edge of it. There are dreams of leaving (“Leave the sound and your heavy head behind” from first single City Song, “Silently running at the moment of waking” from Waiting At The Water) and fear of stasis (“I fell over in my sleep again, a head all cloudy with fine rain, depthless in the breaking day, tiredness is waiting, serpentine” from Unreturning Sun).
The band name, taken from lyrics posited by Mike during the lyric writing process, perfectly encapsulates the atmosphere conjured here, neither sinister nor wholly comforting, unknown yet alluring. As author Will Ashon says in the sleeve notes to the album (an excerpt from his book Strange Labyrinth published by Granta Books), “Everything is always changing in Epping Forest. There’s the yearly cycle of growth and death, of course, and the daily iteration of this in new buds, new blossom, new leaves, dead blossom, dead leaves and so on, the tiny, inconsequential shifts which gradually add up to something more”.
From the album opener, the gently sinister Mirror Descend, to the skyward-looking, hopeful closing track of Mirror Ascend, this collection of songs and rituals leaves space for the listener to take their own journey through a half-real, half-imagined landscape, before emerging changed, re-entering the borderlands at the boundary of the suburban sprawl.
Biographies:
Mirrored Daughters are Marlody, Mike (Firestations), Matt and Lewis (The Leaf Library), and Hannah.
Marlody (Skep Wax) is a singer/songwriter based in Kent. Dominated by her extraordinary keyboard playing, Marlody’s songs are illuminated - and sometimes made sinister - by occasional bursts of programmed percussion, submarine bass and distant, chiming digital bells.
Firestations (Lost Map Records) span genres from shoegaze to alt-pop and harmony-driven psychedelia. Their second album, The Year Dot, released in 2018, was followed by sonic collage album Dream Home in 2020 and the Automatic Tendencies EP project in 2020-21. The latter took the form of three EPs over a six-month period, each including alternative “sunken” versions by the band as well as covers and remixes of the band’s tracks by other artists. Thick Terrain, released in 2023, saw Firestations return to album format with ten tracks ranging from hypnotic sci-fi landscapes to addictive dream-pop jangles, exploring ideas around identity, conflict, progress and sanity.
The Leaf Library (WIAIWYA) are a north London band playing melodic dream-like music built on layers of chiming guitars, pulsing electronics, noise and looping drones. They have released three studio albums (Daylight Versions, About Minerals, The World Is A Bell) and a double LP of rarities and compilation tracks (Library Music: Volume One) on Where It’s At Is Where You Are, a collaborative LP with Japanese artist Teruyuki Kurihara (Melody Tomb) on electronic label Mille Plateaux, and a recent EP of electronic pop songs on the Castles In Space label.
“a moment of unabashed beauty that feels like clouds parting after a storm. By the end of this evocatively autumnal album, Mirrored Daughters have wandered deep into the forest, but are finally out of the woods.” The Quietus
“A diaphanous as much as lamenting wisp of veiled pastoral folk rich tapestry, Mirrored Daughters haven’t just evoked the landscape but blended right in with it, becoming part of the stories, the myth and dream realism of an iconic English woodland. The ensemble manages to inhabit many different ages of existence as they stage an intervention against urbanisation and the loss of wildling areas.
Many fans of the folk idiom, of the English school of folk-rock and bards and troubadours will feel very much at ease with this album, whilst presently surprised by the touches of the unearthly, of visitations and the near cosmic. A case of the familiar and yet, not so familiar. A good start to a new project.” Monolith Cocktail
“From the voice-led cohort of compositions, there are some truly captivating passages to be found. This entails transporting us through the Meg Baird-meets-Tindersticks beauty of “City Song”; the skittering harmony-loaded uplift of “The New Design”; the overlapping vocal swirl of “Unreturning Sun”; the cello-steered hypnotics of “Waiting At The Water”; and the wistful Vashti Bunyan-tinged psych-pop reverie of “An Open Door”.” Freq