At the Bristol Folk House, with its origins as far back as the 1870s, London-born singer-songwriter Flora Hibberd keeps the folk flame lit with a spellbinding performance of fey compositions—reminding the audience that folk is, first and foremost, enchantingly surreal. And that the fading signals from the past can be found—if you tune in.
In 2019, PopMatters premiered Hibberd‘s single, “As Long As There Is Night”, from her debut EP entitled The Absentee. At the start of this year, Hibberd released her debut album, Swirl, which, in a review for PopMatters, Chris Ingalls called “an unmitigated masterpiece”. Yes, PopMatters are long-time fans of Hibberd.
Being an opening act—whatever the venue and whoever the headline artist—can be challenging. Of course, you are playing to someone else’s audience. Supporting the Scottish composer C Duncan, Hibberd took it in her stride. By the first song, she had won over the spectators, with her low mellifluous voice, poised between a chanteuse elegance and a wistful balladeer.
Hibberd isn’t your run-of-the-mill literate songwriter who confuses truism for profundity, beauty for the sublime, or heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentalism for depth. What makes her a cut above the rest is abstraction. Whereas some writers use obfuscation to conceal their shallowness, Hibberd understands that feelings can be most effective when expressed obliquely. Her songs are, really, ciphers. Artifacts. Metaphors.
If you have to pin it down to one word, then transmissions. The word itself is mentioned in “Code”, the opening song of the concert, where the narrator is listening to the voices of the past for signs about life and kismet, a song replete with yearnful unknowing and existential questions. After the final acoustic guitar notes of “Code” rang out, a frisson of awe spread through the crowd, where a large and curly-haired man, who with rabid enthusiasm nearly fell off his seat, bellowed, “Wow”. He expressed what most people in the 150-capacity hall were feeling.
Behind me, a woman sobbed throughout the concert. Nobody, not even her friend, consoled her—she was still weeping when I walked past after the performance. Hibberd, who has lived in Paris since 18, elicits these strong reactions, perhaps because her music is so visceral, emotive, and otherworldly.
As a former translator of art history texts, Hibberd is preoccupied with language. Her songs deal with codes and decoding—that brief moment of discovery and illumination. Words collide like atoms, creating scintillating moments of unexpected imagery. Put simply, language—in whatever form—is the expression, not the stepping stone to it.
As Ingalls astutely writes in his review, Hibberd has seemingly soaked up encyclopedias of pop, rock, and folk music—you name it. For comparisons to contemporary musicians, her songwriting brings to mind Adrianne Lenker and Andy Shauf. Swirl, was produced by Shane Leonard at his home studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Hibberd was joined by a band, who helped her in creating stately arrangements filled with lush instrumentation, including stunning pedal-steels and eddying synths, not to mention reverb-soaked guitars.
Due to being a solo concert, Hibberd was restricted to playing songs on an acoustic guitar; thus, resulting in playing two songs from her 2021 EP, Hold. The first “Archipelago II”, a hauntingly melancholic track, cast a pall of sorrow over the audience, augmented by circular fingerpicking. Arguably, the highlight of the night. Poetically, Hibberd repeated words twice, such as “shifting, shifting” and “drift, and drift”, that, followed by a subtle but effective pause, was finished by the line “into the void”— which made you slip into the void yourself.
Moreover, Hibberd cites Townes Van Zandt: “Townes said it better than I ever could.” Her voice was full of longing and sadness, strife and woe. While the second song performed off of the EP, “Night, Perpetual”, was equally striking and devasting.
Flora Hibberd’s sonorous voice immediately grabs your attention, which imbues these tapestry-like songs with depth and an ineffable grandeur. It is a plurality of voices: haunted, plainspoken singing to quivering to a brute-force growl—take your pick. Perhaps the most obvious point of comparison is Cate Le Bon, specifically, the deadpan diction. That and Hibberd’s elliptical lyrics endow the tracks with a reverie-laden indeterminacy. But, for all her inscrutability, there is an understanding of the misunderstanding.
Great artists are always searching. Whatever Flora Hibberd is searching for creates an indomitable artistic vision and force, leaving you with the feeling that she will not stop for anyone, God included. Furthermore, Hibberd has a fire in her belly that lends itself to the stripped-back arrangements in which she brings out the nuanced emotion of each lyric. Often, while performing, Hibberd gazes off into the distance with such intensity that you get the impression the music is drawing her away from the stage to someplace beyond, exclusive to her, and her alone.
Hibberd, an enigmatic performer, has a potent aesthetic. With short, black-cropped hair, Hibberd is arrestingly androgynous, complete with having a quasi-surrealist mien. Performance-wise, Hibberd oscillates between an absurdist aloofness and a Jacques Brel-like heightened state. Yet, for all her severity, there is a warmth, offset by the occasional impish grin. For example, Hibberd could not suppress a half-smile when a man (yes, the same guy referred to earlier) shouted, “It doesn’t matter about the sound but the emotion” in response to her explaining that usually she performs with a band.
Near the end, Hibberd performed a poignant cover of the folk tune “Silver Dagger”, before closing the concert with “Ticket”, fitting as the narrator sees, almost in a visitation, a person who takes her by surprise. Well, the audience was taken by surprise with Hibberd’s performance.
Overall, Flora Hibberd’s songs are about fleeting moments, like lost radio signals, the humming of live wire, ghostly voices adrift in a pitch-black night, or concerts. The great Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini once said: “It isn’t that the dead don’t speak, it’s that we have forgotten how to listen.” That is what I hear in Hibberd’s music: the voices of the past. I could be wrong, with my judgement amiss and my metaphors weak. All I know is, if you tune in, you will hear a compelling and, dare I say it, sui generis artiste.