Hen Ogledd - the quartet consisting of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington - take a deliberately organic and natural approach on their second album ‘Free Humans’, out on Weird World. Inspired as much by ABBA as the work of 12th Century mystic-composer-naturalist-visionary Hildegard von Bingen, touched equally by the spirits of radical philosophical plumber Mary Midgley and PC Music star Hannah Diamond, as quiet as the paintings of Agnes Martin yet bombastic like a Werner Herzog documentary... it’s an album of seamless, glorious contradictions. Tackling themes of love, friendship, Gaia theory, sewers, the nature of time, human stench and the thrills of wild swimming, it’s remarkable that, given the intense collision of influences and wide-ranging ideas at play, ‘Free Humans’ somehow coheres into a marvellous whole.