There is something distinctly other-worldly about this debut recording from Astraluna- The Pass of Storms. The album, freshly released by singer-songwriter Astraluna, opens with Rise and Fall, apparently inspired by a trip to the Torridon Mountains on the west coast of Scotland. Anyone familiar with the area will immediately identify with the cosmic nature of the song; close your eyes, you will be transported straight to the top of one of those peaks to a tiny sliver of land where everything feels a whole lot fresher. Astraluna’s voice is a mesh between the bewitching bittersweet of Harriet Wheeler form 80s indie band The Sundays, and the soaring highs of 60s hippy legend Joni Mitchell (think Blue prior to her cigarette-induced husky days). Like Mitchell, she is able to make sudden shifts in range, one minute earthy and rooted, the next scaling haunting new heights. The ethereal quality of her music seeps into what, at first listening, sounds like a harp. It’s not a harp, but a ukulele. Astraluna has reinvented the instrument, morphing it into something much purer and more appealing than you may have heard before. The album itself is aptly named. It switches mood from melancholic and nostalgic, with songs like I Can’t Find The Words, to more fervently upbeat tracks such as Play With Fire (“fire deep within me, oh cleanse my soul”). You can almost sense the rumbling of rain clouds overhead with each chord change. The Pass of Storms feels intimate, almost like a letter to a former self, or perhaps an awakening self. At times it displays an echoing loneliness, but it’s also an album that commands a new space, a space that is as unique as it is inspirational. Andrea Hardaker Ilkley Literature Festival