Ha'fest: Chantal Acda & choir / Anna von Hausswolff

FRAGILE, BEAUTIFUL MELANCHOLY IN SAINT JAMES' CHURCH

The Belgian-Dutch artist Chantal Acda is known for intimate songs filled with subtle layers of fragile beauty. After Let Your Hands Be My Guide (2013), her acclaimed follow-up album The Sparkle In Our Flaws is ready for release. For the concert in Ghent's Saint James' Church, her traditional instrumental brothers make way for a group of horn players and percussionists and a male choir. Join them in the quest for magic amid a heavenly ambience.

Chantal Acda has been around for some time, performing with groups that include Isbells, Marble Sounds and True Bypass. She embarked on a solo career two years ago. Her fragile songs are breaking hearts around the world, with a little help from well-known denizens of the music world such as Adam Wiltzie (A Winged Victory For The Sullen) and Nils Frahm.

The Sparkle In Our Flaws is being released by Germany's Glitterhouse Records. Acda crossed the pond from Europe to record in Portland, Oregon with her faithful regulars Peter Broderick (Efterklang), Shahzad Ismaily (cf. Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and Valgeir Sigurdsson (cf. Björk).

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF | NEW ALBUM THE MIRACULOUS

"Growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolff occasionally retreated—as so many kids do—to her own alternate dimension. Like all fanciful realms, this hallowed spot, deemed "the miraculous place", honed the young von Hausswolff’s imagination like a gym for the mind. "The border between fantasy and reality was so blurred," she recently told the Quietus. As the former monarch of the woods across the street from my elementary school, I can attest to this sensation: there’s something about self-created folklore that sharpens the spirit like no other exercise can, and one could argue that such myths lay at the heart of not just childhood, but human experience as a whole." Pitchfork (7.8)