Tasseomancy – Soft Feet // Song Of The Day #249

Tasseomancy: a fortune-telling ‘technique’ that involves reading tea leaves or coffee grounds. One of the elements of occultism that has a particularly strong resonance with the British, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Here is a band, then, whose name seems to perfectly encapsulate their music. Despite their Canadian heritage, Tasseomancy (who you might well recognise as two fifths of Austra) appear rooted in English folk traditions. They seem to embrace both history and the countryside, making music that is at once pastoral and disturbing, bare and yet substantial. Simple, guitar-and-vocal arrangements give way to expansive, Eastern film score-esque compositions before suddenly collapsing back in on themselves, like something caught out of the corner of your eye in the middle of the woods. In other words: really quite scary.

‘Soft Feet’ is taken from Tasseomancy’s second album, Ulalume, which is out on Turf on 9 August.