BLOOM, KATH - Finally

Kath Bloom is a fifty year old American legend of folk, country, blues and avant-garde music, but very few people have ever heard of her.\r\nShe has been making records since the late 70s, and has had her music featured in the movie Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater (starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), but since 1984 has released no new material of her own bar a few self-distributed cassettes and CD-Rs.\r\nThe daughter of world-renowned oboist Robert Bloom, Kath was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where she trained as a cellist. However, she soon gave away formal musical education for the acoustic guitar, which she taught herself over long afternoons spent among the tombstones of her local cemetery.\r\nAfter a brief romance and musical collaboration with journeyman songwriter Bruce Neumann, she met avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors in 1976, teaming up with him for a series of now highly sought-after recordings of traditional blues and folk songs and Blooms originals. Some records were released in editions of as few as fifty, most no more than 200 copies, until the duo released their swansong Moonlight in 1984.\r\nWhile Connors astounding solo work from that time has been compiled into a four CD set by Sonic Youths Thurston Moore, Bloom and Mazzacanes duo recordings still languish in un-re-released obscurity, except for a single CD compilation that is now almost as hard to find as the original LPs. \r\nAlthough Chapter Music, unfortunately, cannot help in that regard, it can present a compilation of Kath Blooms heartbreaking, lovelorn and remarkably beautiful songs recorded since the early 90s, when after a period of child-rearing, family life and daily financial struggle, Kath began to return to the studio. These are songs recorded on the fly in friends lounge rooms or cut-rate studios, but they reveal a mother-of-three songwriter as accomplished and affecting as any of her more hallowed colleagues such as Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch or Hazel Dickens.\r\nIn the mid-nineties US director Richard Linklater stumbled across her music and used the song Come Here in Before Sunrise, but despite an initial flurry of interest, little came of the exposure and Kath soon returned to domestic obscurity. \r\nTen years later, perhaps Kath Blooms moment has finally come, and one of the best singer/ songwriters of the last 25 years will be accorded some long-overdue recognition. - Chapter Music.