June McDoom

Brudenell presents June McDoom at Brudenell Social Club.

“Lush instrumentation – acoustic guitars, synths, harps and piano – float with almost aquatic grace, naturally as if rising towards the glow beyond the surface, intimate and warm, yet somehow disembodied and mysterious as well.”

“Follow The Light is a thing with many heads, moving in unexpected patterns, delicate and vivid and often both, laced with seams and wings like folded cloth.”

“Merges Weyes Blood’s grandeur with the whimsy of Minnie Riperton, enveloping you in its wall of sound.”

“The drum plumes and echoey patter recall Kate Bush. It is both jaunty and fierce. Her inner spirit guides her away from brutal forces. She searches for freedom, for brightness.”

June McDoom releases Human Angel, a single from her debut album Follow The Light. Originally written as a folk song, Human Angel grew into one of June’s first experiments blending folk with reggae instrumentation, pairing nylon guitar and a rhythm inspired by Eek-A-Mouse overlapped with dreamy vocals, chiming textures and synth flourishes.

June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound, built his own speakers and maintained three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate. She did not mind being the only one listening to folk; the solitude gave her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words.

Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a mento musician who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands.

As June layers these songs, this record, she is figuring out who she is in real time. There is a lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here, a collection of people and things that do not seem to go together, but we let them in anyway.