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 serafina steer session
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.English pluck. London-based harpist-singer Serafina Steer is getting used to comparisons with Joanna Newsom. Like Newsom, she recasts the most maiden aunt-like of orchestral instruments as a thing of thrumming vitality and minimalist beauty, though her songwriting owes more to the quirky austerity of post-punk mavens The Raincoats than it does to winsome folk. Steer remains phlegmatic about the Newsom parallels nonetheless. “When I first heard her I just hung my head in my hands. But it’s a blessing really – and I think she’s great. We choose to write about very different things but I can’t listen to her too much - I could just end up aping her totally…”  With a first-class music degree from Trinity College, Steer keeps a toe in the legit classical realm but is otherwise busy dragging her unwieldy instrument around the sticky-floored UK gig circuit. Her debut album, Cheap Demo Bad Science, was recently released by Static Caravan – original home of Tunng. That band’s Mike Lindsay co-produced the record, which weds subtle electronics to Steer’s harp, keyboards, deadpan vocals and unflinching lyrics, which blur cartoonish fantasy with kitchen-sink reality. The particularly stark Council Flat is heavy on the latter. “It’s a song about where I was living, in Hackney. I would play just to try and stop hearing the people downstairs. From the snippets of conversation you’d try and fathom out what was troubling them so much.” She also makes room for that rarest of things, a Brian Eno cover, the exquisitely pastoral By This River. “I think Brian Eno is amazing. I’d gone on to this little island in the middle of the Thames to record some voice and harp songs for the album. We were on a river, it sounded nice… It seemed fitting.”  Steer is soon to support reformed late-70s indie avatars Young Marble Giants, and has innumerable projects, both classical and otherwise, in the pipeline. Though her star is palpably rising, she remains beguilingly modest about her aspirations. “I hope to keep having things to say. I’m very ambitious but not in a particularly focused way. I just hope I can cobble another album together, basically.”
David Sheppard
Serafina Steer - Cheap Demo Bad Science, out now on Static Caravan.
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