Delighted to be heading back out again this summer : ) Hope to see you somewhere along the road! Xx

/https://youtu.be/tx50eKLRB5M?si=G6peEo7tP0GTOYjD A lovely consideration of our new video from Alex Gallacher at Folk Radio https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2024/01/jonathan-day-collective-in-a-garden-of-stones/

‘Tamarisk and the Raven’ – mainstage at Festival in the Desert – under a full moon and a lunar eclipse She moves through the fair – representing the music of these sea washed islands with fiddle, bagpipes and voice Press piece All photos courtesy of Jonathan Day Interviews & Guest...

LANDED – lovely award winning festival in the Welsh mountains on the headwaters of the Wye. Trio playing the headline slot Saturday night on the Magus Stage. WORKHOUSE STEAMPUNK WELLNESS FESTIVAL Shrewsbury

Folk Radio review of Sakura by Thomas Blake  Sakura is an album recorded in the Welsh hills but rooted in Japanese and East Asian culture. This isn’t as contradictory as it sounds: the Japanese religious experience emphasises the primacy of nature. Shinto beliefs, in particular, are based on a subtle...

We’re off to Weston in Shropshire to play at Camp Bestival : ) So happy to be invited by Sarah at Twisted Agency to play at this iconic – but most importantly fun – festival. We’re on Mainstage Friday early afternoon and at the Carvanserai stage on Sunday – at...

We’re launching our summer festival tour with a special intimate concert at the gorgeous IN GOOD HANDS in Frankwell, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, supporting REFUGEE WEEK. Would love to see you there x

LISTEN here: https://jonathanday.bandcamp.com/album/orphans-of-the-storm Four songs of love and loss, a distillation of years spent wandering and playing. Presenting stories from a frozen midsummer’s night on a Danish island, the deep countryside of Belarus, streets in Bali and the wide black land of Minnesota, these compositions take their heart from time, silence...

Click this link to buy /https://jonathanday.bandcamp.com/album/a-spirit-library PRESS RELEASE:  a Spirit Library Following Carved in Bone and Atlantic Drifter, Shropshire borderlands based singer songwriter Jonathan Day releases his third studio album a Spirit Library, at the beginning of April. Recorded at SFG studio in the Berwyn Mountains and at the Magic Garden, the...

Delighted that a Spirit Library is a Folk Radio Album of the Year for 2019. Thanks so much to all at FRUK – for me the most innovative and considered voice in the music I love. Thank you, with all my heart, to everyone who has been to a show, shared a...

A selection of visual representations of songs from a Spirit Library  

In Dreams a Crossing of Great Seas. My thanks to amazing animator Shiyi Li for giving light and colour to the dreams, intuitions and memories of which this song is spun.

Live footage from the launch tour

Recording between a Garden and the sea…   The new album kind of started with an impromptu. Fingal’s cave in Scotland had the most stunning acoustic, sound sparking off the mostly hexagonal basalt lava columns, spinning in the most entrancing way. Deep in the cave in the almost black, on...

There’s something about light. Light wrapped around the day, driving away all but a relic of night. Sun from the north, across the top of the world, preternatural. Full bright on wind blown, mare’s tail waterfalls and a wonderfully strange, quiet, midnight gloaming. Light bursting inside a huge chunk of...

Recent interview with Folk Radio Uk, click the image to view  : )

2018 A SOUND OF BIRDS TOUR 24/3 – WORLDBRIDGER, Llanrhaedr (Ugandan permaculture benefit) https://tinyurl.com/y8vevwcn 31/3 EOSTRE fest Y Dolydd 4/4 REGGAE INNOVATION, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reggae-innovation-conference-tickets-43928155295 13/4 The FACE of WATER, the FACE of SNOW with Jane Siberry (Freedom from Torture/Medecins Sans Frontiers benefit) In Good Hands Shrewsbury https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3385303 6/5 WENLOCK POETRY...

Images, recording, processing, text, music and instrumental performance by Jonathan. An Oriole over the Tian Shan ~ ‘Birdtime’, Hong Kong Art’s Festival 6’17, Hong Kong City Hall.    9th June 1924 (for George Mallory and Andrew Irvine) ~ audience recording, Music, Myth and Realities festival, Bangkok 9’17.   Kupu Kupu...

Images from The Dim Lit Subterranea of the Ancient Mind, Bangkok, August 2017. Photographs by Jean Davide Caillouet and Gabriel Camelin. Soft warm wind on the worm brown water, a coiling slither from the deep green heartland, the Temple of Dawn sparkling in the darkness, water around and in everything....

Images created for the Fairacre Press/Wenlock Poetry Festival volume Lyric    

Selections from my book Postcards from the Road, published by Chicago University Press/Intellect [more selections at http://takeonartmagazine.com/article-details/205 see also http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-entertainment/article/1772140/jonathan-day-postcards-road http://www.lumenvisum.org/site/exhibition/postcards-from-the-road-jonathan-day-2/  http://www.artnews.com/2014/06/19/new-photo-books-on-cartier-bresson-robert-frank-and-more/ http://www.aicahk.org/eng/reviews.asp?id=326 ]   The Vesuvio Café, San Francisco, is old, like the district. During the Gold Rush, when Chinatown was threatened by the authorities, the shop owners shot at the...

PORTFOLIO: 4 RECENT PIECES      

   

  Soft warm wind on the worm brown water, a coiling slither from the deep green heartland, the Temple of Dawn sparkling in the darkness, water around and in everything. A hall painted with shifting light, a hundred instruments new and strange – pulsing the life-beat of these ancient lands,...

Evelyn Waugh captures the evanescence of song so beautifully in these lines from Brideshead Revisited: Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones… We scrawl songs and stories as signs, for our selves and each other, of the mystery as we pass. They...

                                Very happy to be able to support POSTCARDS FOR PEACE’s fundraising and awareness project A WORLD OF HOPE. Postcards for Peace works in peace, diversity and inclusion advocacy with young people around the world. The contributors...

Busy schedule this trip – Oxford, Cyprus and Parliament in a little over a week : ) Visual feast to begin with  at the Bodleian and the Byzantine studies institute in OXFORD showing  hidden gospels of the mountain monastery at Garima in Northern Ethiopia. Airports – and Heathrow particularly – not...

INTERVIEW WITH THE BBC’S Jim Hawkins, talking sounds, words and images – the ingredients that make an album. Please click to listen x  

Delightful experience with Shrewsbury Poetry at the LOFT, Milk Street, Shrewsbury debuting a number of new pieces, including this : )    

http://bbc.in/2bxMXoM So delighted with this animation – BBC/ BRITISH LIBRARY took a section of an interview with myself, my daughter and the BBC’s Genevieve Tudor, and animated it. We were talking about touring in Thailand and the story of Rama and Sita. Click on the image to watch… lovely job don’t...

8th century celtic poetry, translated, woven into a song and performed in the beautiful ancient Iona Abbey cloister. A film from the white sands and azure sea, about wilderness, old wisdom and hope.

The Independent newspaper features ‘Lyric’ – a new book I’ve curated, introduced and illustrated – which brings together song lyrics from a range of writers and presents them as poetry.   ARTICLE, full text “So Shakespeare is now officially 400 years dead. This enormously wonderful and argued over figure who...

Performing at WENLOCK POETRY FESTIVAL – heart’s homeland, my feet in Silurian earth, wisps of morning caught on warm yellow-grey stone and a distant Wrekin – Speedwell, Stitchwort and Periwinkle wreathing our words. The old stones and alleyways of the little town were alive in a different way – poetry stuffed...

Atlantic Drifter Launch Tour CHINA TOUR – GUANGZHOU I’d dreamed my way through the markets of Tashkent and rode, in sleep, the thermals of the Tian Shan night, with brilliant coloured orioles and black kites. I woke over the Five Ridges as the sun rose, and watched huge piles of...

44th Hong Kong Arts Festival – More than Folk presented by Bird Time Jazz Club and Hong Kong Folk Club ONNAGATA, CANTICLE and NORTHERN SKY PONCHARTRAIN, CAFE IN THE VALLEY OF THE FIRE CHURCH

Radio Interview: Jonathan talks ancient music, found instruments and singing into the silence with Gary Wilcox on ‘the Quiet Revolution’

Critically acclaimed album ATLANTIC DRIFTER “Breathtakingly beautiful” Folk Radio UK, featured album “Very lovely: putting the poetry back into song lyrics” BBC “Expansive, intelligent and eloquent” South China Morning Post “Ton Tussa Solas – one of the most well-observed love songs I’ve ever heard” Folk Radio UK “Day’s guitar playing evokes...

A pre-release from Jonathan’s new album Atlantic Drifter has been chosen as ‘Song of the Day’ by Folk Radio UK – Britain’s biggest folk magazine.    

來自路上的名信片 Postcards from the Road Jonathan Day  18.4 – 28.5.2015 開幕酒會 Opening Reception  18.04.2015 (六 Sat) 4 – 6 pm 藝術家講座 Artist‘s Talk 18.04.2015 (六 Sat) 3 – 4 pm Jonathan Day 出生的那一年，Robert Frank 出版了攝影集《The Americans》。書紀錄了這位瑞士裔美國藉攝影家花了兩年，開著一輛老舊二手車，穿越48個州分的美國之旅。按Jack Kerouac 的話，Frank「用菲林從美利堅索出一首憂傷的詩歌」。那是1959年。 書後來成為經典，被認為改變了攝影藝術的走向。半世紀後，英國伯明翰的Jonathan Day來到美國，源著前人的足跡，嘗試軿湊書中那「垮掉的一代」的雨零星散。開著租來的車，他在那些通往地平線的公路上，遇上了那些肥大的汽車，那些星條旗，那些十字架，只是，那些符號所指向的早已不是五十年代那浮華世界，而是《The Americans》當代的一章。我們仿佛可以看到，Frank的車就在前面駛過，揚起一片灰塵，裡面載著兩個異鄉人，在作一場跨半世紀的對話。 展覽源自Jonathan Day 同名著作。 The year when Jonathan Day was born, Robert...

Skylarks look for lovers over Berwyn – last night’s late snow sullies the high tops – cloudy, dove-grey felt refuses the sun that warms my back. Spring in the borderlands, spring in the mountains. Delighted to have a print series celebrating the arrival of spring featured in the recently published Barefoot Diaries, a...

A wild wind is blowing from the Welsh Mountains, finding the cracks in my quiet house. The small bells of Sheinton Church are ringing in the blackness – must be Christmas Eve… x  

Santorini has been a place to settle – find stillness and consider new music from a calm place. The little town a confection of stolid earth walled houses, built one upon another, falling higgledy up the caldera. From a distance it looks like snow crusting the lava… In a deep shadow...

After the liquid heat of Bangkok and the beautiful people of a two day helter-skelter Welsh festival – watching the evening light flood a mountain valley from my balcony in Santorini is as close to paradise as I can imagine. Sitting in the warm dry Aegean wind, as summer softly...

Gigs at Zoo club, Pra Nathong and with Ross Ainslie (Salsa Celtica), Alice Orton, Mick Callan and Nigel Richards (IndiaAlba) at Wunderbar in Pra Arthit Today is the day of the winter wind. My friend wrapped herself in shawls against the chill – while I sighed for joy at the...

THAIS BELIEVE THAT FREEING A LIFE BRINGS BENEFIT AND BLESSING. This one ancient and arcane belief holds within it the heart of mercy, the thing so obviously missing in our grab-it-all society. The reality is more mundane and questionable – on the banks of the river, plastic buckets hold fish,...

“I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire: For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.” A WONDERFUL time at 86’d GALLERY, stuck in a high window looking over the late-lit Severn, each side surrounded by an engine assault of high day bikers, cruising the strip. Through the open...

Jonathan’s photo book Postcards from the Road (University of Chicago Press) made while touring in the USA available here REVIEW BY NEW YORK’S “ARTnews” MAGAZINE click on image to go there : ) http://www.artnews.com/2014/06/19/new-photo-books-on-cartier-bresson-robert-frank-and-more/

MOON DAPPLING A NIGHT GARDEN An improvisation for a warm evening by Rob Carolan (hang drum) and Jonathan Day (alto). Played in the forest hall at Mellowcroft in the Welsh mountains. Cover image by Ed Lam : )

WENLOCK FESTIVAL was a haze of summer skies, screeching swifts and rooks squabbling in the twilight. Lovely audiences plumped on strawberries and ice cream – awash with tea and Pimms, willing us on to be our best. Ancient Abbey stones still warm from the sun was all the amplification we...

  Sky is cerulean blue, filled with the appealing screech (who would have thought those words would appear together?) of swifts and martens. Must be summer… and time for a Shropshire festival. Shropshire is divided into the Southern hills and Northern plain, that melds slowly and inevitably into Cheshire. I...

Farewell then, South China Sea, you have been beautiful… but Folk on the Park waits for no one : ) #AtlanticDrifterTour http://folkonthepark.co.uk/  

PERFORMANCE AT HKDI – I HAVE SO LOVED PLAYING IN ASIA! The warm enthusiasm of Hong Kong listeners is lovely : ) … I’m singing about a neolithic circle, half lost in the North Atlantic – playing a huge Chinese drum that was in the venue – swopped for my...

  PEEL STREET FRESCO, CENTRAL, HONG KONG.Walking from the Soho levels down, threading between dark wooden restaurants, Peel street begins with the reek of incense, throat-scratchingly intense. The always burning smoke in a small alcove, red tiled, functional, with an indecipherable inscription hidden in a lockable niche. PEEL STREET FRESCO,...

Flying out of Europe in the rain – like pushing through gray felt, fibres catching at the wings. A brilliant blue was with us most of the way, sunshine curling round the top of the world, stained the colour of air. Catching a little fitful sleep I woke to the...

: ) Cefn Ymarfer Coed Naturial festival in Coed Nant Gain was a truly exceptional gig : ) Iliffe the forest Steward is 7 feet tall with fiery red hair and as spindly as a birch sapling. Songbirds and insects buzzed a continuo for our songs – yellow archangel, stitchwort...

Very happy to announce this year’s summer tour. Hope to see you somewhere on the road! x 25.3 Helsinki, Finland   http://www.aalto.fi 26.3 Arabiankatu, Finland   http://www.aalto.fi 27.3 Kapelli, Finland   http://valokuvataiteenmuseo.fi/fi/tulossa-en 2–3.5 Landed Festival, Rhayader, Wales   http://www.landedfestival.co.uk 4.5 Sun Festival, Severn Meadows, Low Town, Bridgnorth   http://tiny.cc/myn9dx 17.5 Celf Ymarfer Coedwig Naturial, Coed Nant Gain   www.naturalforestpractice.com   www.freetheforest.org 18.5 Handpan gathering, Mellowcroft, Llandrindod, Wales LD1 5UF   http://tiny.cc/6ml9dx 1.6 Bookworm Café, Lamma Island, Hong Kong   facebook.com/bookwormcafehk 3.6 Peel Fresco, Peel Street, Central, Hong Kong   http://www.peelfresco.com 5.6 Tiu Keng Leng Auditiorium, Hong Kong 13.6 Folk on the Park, Lower Lacon, Wem, Shropshire   http://www.folkonthepark.co.uk 16–21.6 Much Wenlock Festival, Shropshire   http://www.muchwenlockfestival.co.uk/ 11–13.7 Workhouse Festival, Llanfyllin, Powys   http://the-workhouse.org 19.7 Festival at the Edge, Stokes’ Barn, Shropshire http://www.festivalattheedge.org/ 23.7 86’d, Ironbridge, Shropshire   https://www.facebook.com/EightySixd.uk 2.8 Farm Fest, Bruton, Somerset   http://www.farmfestival.co.uk 7.8 Shrewsbury Poetry, Eat Up Milk Street, Shrewsbury   https://www.facebook.com/events/657130877679526/?fref=ts 16.8 Shrewsbury Flower Show   http://www.shrewsburyflowershow.org.uk 18.8 Wunderbar, Pattaya, Bangkok   https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wunderbar-Bangkok/100850346735158 20.8 Cat...

Tour blog – music, photo, travelogue mashup goes to Finland  Departures – so nothing and nowhere – it’s a no place and no time. Such marvels, though, wait through the doors at the end of these silver tubes : ) Looking for Noggin. I’m flying, so half my face is...

Delighted to be taking a bunch of songs, pictures and travel stories to Finland, hosted by Aalto University. Weather forecast is icy, with a strong chance of Moomins x      

  Vagabond from the Blue Sky, part 2 An interview with FolkRadio’s Alex Gallacher Talking about his experiences of music and the road, Jonathan continued: Life, it often seems to me, is like a string of beads: moments strung like pearls on the fading continuum of my passing. Here are some...

Walking over the narrow bridge on the Sheinbrook, I saw three Grey Wagtails fly together along the water. Even without belief I still love the ancient augurers’ ways – predicting the future by the omens of animals. Moments later a deep chocolate brown dipper followed, its white tail like a kite or a nervous ladies fan, pretty against the reflected sky. As it flew into low hanging leaves an azure Kingfisher flashed its brilliance and was gone. Something beautiful is coming and these quiet creatures are its subtle heralds and vanguards x  

Folk Life: Jonathan Day – Vagabond from the Blue Sky   by ALEX GALLACHER, FolkRadio   I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Day’s music since he sent his album ‘Carved in Bone’. He’s a very keen traveller and always seems to be off on some journey, so much so that...

Across Shropshire in early light after a cold and wonderful night playing our last outdoor festival of summer. We saw our breath as we sang… so now autumn, a season like my soul. A mist skein scarfing the hills, translucent as a jelly fish. Sometimes heavy rain, speaking of winter,...

Looking out into the darkness from a high place, across a river – the hundred thousand lights are engulfed in rain. A warm rain like a cat that curls around every corner, a quiet voice from a more subtle world. The musical life has brought me here, far from my...

Well it’s that time again… said my sad goodbyes – half a world will pass beneath my feet before I stand back on the earth and pick up my guitar… : ) After this wild and windy year, epitomised most by the moorland and meteorological Edale festival a few short...

Wandering and playing in Amphawa today … once-was trading port for Siam, water worn timber houses, fragile in the sun, so close to the tidal river and canals they seem in danger at any moment of inundation. Temples necklace the viridian forest, realisation out of water and brilliant light, home...

A time of black and white in my Shropshire hills. The Shein brook which winds along to the Hafren/Severn covered itself in ice. Wandering its upper reaches, I found otter tracks. A really profound feeling, silently welcoming back this elusive creature of water and air. I followed its path over...

Arrival Not the most enjoyable of flights, but I am arrived intact by Budget air : ) Revisited Brussels airport, where as a 9 year old I arrived back from Africa… and breathed with the most profound and lasting joy the chill mist laden air. The Agia Napa accomodation is...

Rooftop gig in Hong Kong.

The Shropshire countryside is embedded in the very fabric of this first proper release by Jonathan Day, a writer, painter and poet whose curiosity has taken him around the world and back on a journey of self-discovery, from Johannesburg to the heart of the Black Country, his true inspirational home....

I like the quiet, the animals and the trees. It took me a long time to get here from where I grew up, in between factories, steel hard and iron grey. Long ago most of my family lived in these borderlands; I guess I’ve always been slowly heading home. There’s...