Samana is a pioneering duo, that integrate the creation of music, poetry film and photography into one unique project
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Press For ‘The Knife’
(2024)
“The epic single ‘The Knife’, swells majestically from subtle instrumentation and affecting tones of Rebecca Rose Harris, into a thrilling crescendo: an exhilarating release of noise and energy.”
God Is In The T.V
“I love this band, every release gets my attention. It is very different and very compelling, like all their music. Just wonderful!”
Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6 Music
“That was something else! I't’s such a brilliant, flashing climax to the song. Its cosmic, very special indeed”
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales
“It drifts – or perhaps overlaps – the very real world around us while at the same time leaning into those places we perhaps can’t see or feel but know to exist.”
KOLF Magazine
Press For ‘Seven Years’
(2023)
“Seven Years’ is a gorgeous skeletal-folk song scattered with tenderly drawn instrumentals and the majestic vocals of Rebecca Rose Harris that remind me of Karen Dalton waltzing with Joni Mitchell. It searches for forgotten memories, drifting between – or perhaps suspended within – both piercing light and enveloping dark. It’s wonderful!"
God Is In The T.V
“You can hear it in the patient uncurling of leaves, unfolding of petals, beautiful sapling freshness: Samana and ‘Seven Years’ I really, really love this!
Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6
“Oh god this is so beautiful! A meditative balm. It’s so tantalising and exquisite, utterly transfixing, expansive and jaw droppingly beautiful!”
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales
“Seven Years is an instantly engaging yet delicate song, crafted with care and delivered with sincerity. All perfectly reflected in the accompanying video”
Folk Radio
“The listener is taken on a journey that feels both ethereal and grounded, evoking a deep emotional response”
Where The Music Meets
“Sublime music!”
Bethan Elfy, BBC Radio Wales
Press For ‘Two Wrongs’
(2022)
“Now one of my favourite artists and I am honoured to say that this is the first play anywhere of the new single from Samana. This is something incredibly special! The continuously and increasingly, artistically, truly free Samana. Rebecca’s my favourite singer at the moment.”
Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6
“This is a stunning, stunning song!”
Huw Stephens, BBC Radio Wales
“There are parallels to the lifestyle of Samana and their new modes of creating as they push at those boundaries – to escape the mundane and live life with a new meaning. With the music of ‘Two Wrongs,’ you can almost hear that train in the shimmering percussion and feel the wind in your face. It’s an ode to being free.”
Folk Radio
“Imagine Robbie Basho fronting latter-day Bad Seeds and you won’t be too far off the mark”
Backseat Mafia
“So gracefully evocative and yes, cinematic art. Goosebumps on my soul!”
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales
“A superb slice of soaring, majestic folk!”
Still Listening Magazine
Press For ‘All One Breath’
(2022)
Mojo magazine named ‘All One Breath’ the No.1 psychedelic folk album of 2022
“Samana’s soothing vocals and sliding guitars serenade a journey to deep bliss on All One Breath. It conjures a sound that demonstrates rawness and vulnerability, yet so beautifully alive. The outstanding instrumentation on this record are enough to transcend the listener into a state of melancholy bliss. The sliding and hammering guitar parts beautifully accompany Harris’ low and dreamy vocals that create raw, soulful and hypnotic music. Considering most of the tracks were improvised, it’s astonishingly structured and consistent. Harris and Mockett have gifted us with a sonically and thematically beautiful piece of work that compliments their raw talent. Proven by their improvisation and restrictive recording process, it resulted in a record that truly inspires awe.”
9/10
Line Of Best Fit
“Meditative deep reflections, swooning wanderlust, an anaesthetising reach - think Nico, Jarboe, Mazzy Star”
4/5 stars
Mojo Magazine
“Mistaking Samana for a product of the Deep South is easy when their second album sounds so raw, rustic and drowsy. A predominantly dreamy vibe.”
Uncut Magazine
“The choirs of The Glory Of Love rise in the middle of a beat-up guitar crushed like on a New Orleans porch, in the form of an incandescent prayer to love. On All One Breath, the piano stroll extends towards songs of multiplied whales drowned by a cloud of smoke. The reasoning drum of The Spirit Moving beats the measure of a guitar à la Chris Isaac impregnated with a mystical voice seeming to address the beyond. The Beach still slows down everything with its acerbic and apathetic resonances. The violins appear at the end of the disc with a certain force impregnating the title Leaving, which tackles the themes of departure and absence, despite the spring softness of the strings. Some additions of cello come to elevate Begin Again as a sign of eternal renewal. Orchestrations handled to millimetres, even to microns, for a record that has decided to stop time and evaporate in a fog, somewhere between the Pyrenees and Brecon Beacons.”
4/5 stars
Sound of Violence
“Both the album title and the duo's name encapsulate the essence of their sound, as well as highlighting the route of their spiritual path. 'All One Breath' traces a circular journey and embraces a panoramic range of style and influences, ranging from progressive folk to transcendental blues. It serves as an exploration of silence, solitude and time, as well as a recollection of personal experience and memories. By the time we reach 'Leaving', and 'Begin Again' (with its gently strummed guitar, and cello accompaniment), it is almost as though the listener has been taken on their own enlightening journey of discovery as well.”
Outline Magazine
“For a band born in England before moving to Wales, they seem more honed in on the culture of the American West. That dichotomy rests at the heart of their music.No one seems to know melancholy the way Samana does; it rests in every pore. Wanders in worlds of the unfamiliar, they imbue their music a similar sense of rootlessness. At the heart of Samana and All One Breath opposite worlds seem to coalesce forming contradictions that are part of the very fabric of life. They travel emotional pathways through a constantly changing landscape, documenting moments that may never come again.”
Folk Radio
“Here’s one for lovers of voluptuous slow burners. The duo know how to make the very best of slow-paced sounds!”
Shindig
“Their second album is a real treat and one that lulls you into a soporific state of drifting reverie. Harris possesses a vocal style that is both haunting and languid in her delivery. When you wrap her esoteric words around the lush melodies created by Mockett, then what you get is a restrained magic across these ten songs. An album to treasure and one that is both hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving. I am in awe of the talent on display”
Lonesome Highway
“The spiritual path of ‘All One Breath’ acts as an invitation to regain possession of ourselves and our time, as well as rediscovering harmony with the environment that surrounds us, the desire to overcome our borders and learn, looking at everything with eyes different, to be able to capture a multitude of small details, expressions and changes at the first shot, just like a skilled photographer with a Leica M6 loaded with black and white film in search of the perfect shot, forgetting the superfluous.”
4/5 stars
Il Cibicida
“The pair’s sophomore album is one that confronts the heaviest elements of the human condition alternately surrendering to this heaviness and transcending it. All One Breath was written during a period devoid of ‘the touch of humanity’ and as such these songs can almost feel as though they were written by the last people on earth – finding solace in their solitude while pondering the unknowable.”
Secret Meeting
“This will remove the roofs from your houses, you’re going to float off and out and into the ether. There is a sense of elevation; it reminds me of Mazzy Star in it’s expansion and openness. There’s something very, very special about the vocal - Rebecca Rose Harris’s voice is just utterly, utterly, utterly gorgeous!”
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales
“Gorgeous, night time melancholic psych-folk that crackles with wood smoke and campfire light. What you hear now, a refined, timeless collection that sighs with the weight of stars and darkness, hills and forests, dreams and fears. Harris’s voice is a shimmering silken thread that binds Mockett’s patchwork of Americana guitar styles. Pull the blanket up and play this softly, through headphones, just before bed.
8/10
God Is In The TV
“Samana’s album is one that confronts the heaviest elements of the human condition – alternately surrendering to this heaviness and transcending it.”
Still Listening Magazine
Press For Singles from ‘All One Breath’
(2021)
“I can’t recommend anything more highly. This is the sound of art meeting love in a very real way. Samana are my artist of the year and defiantly my favourite find of the year!”
Guy Garvey, BBC6 Music
“A gorgeous return, a song of escape that re-envisions the open road as a pathway for possibility. Surging, beatific songwriting, there's an Autumnal charm to Samana's work, a kind of gilded appeal that resonates with folk charm.”
CLASH Magazine
“For me, they create music almost entirely of themselves; the only artists working nearby I can think of is the pre-Mazzy star outfit, Opal and Samana seem to push beyond that into a different more organic mystery. Heart-stoppingly beautiful. It has that quality that is so uniquely Samana. It unfolds at a leisurely, narcotic pace, acoustic chords a subtle earthing for Rebecca’s deep dulcet lyric and lazy, psychedelic guitar touches. It’s the sound of a hot July day with crickets humming, some hitherto unvisited medieval church in the distance; the smell of ozone and gunmetal clouds gathering in the distance, threatening to break the lazy heat.”
Backseat Mafia
“It is an unequivocally compelling reflection of humanity”
Atwood Magazine
“There’s a difference between a good vocal performance and those special ones that really make time stop and captivate you from the first note till the last syllable is sung. And the performance of Rebecca Rose Harris definitely belongs into the second category.”
Nothing But Hope And Passion
“Ambitious and heartful, together, they’re setting the psychedelic folk world alight with their haunting art. With textured, euphonious vocal performances and deep, intertwining, practiced musical knack, It shouldn’t be long before their name becomes household overseas.”
For Folks Sake
“The first thing that hits you are the incredible vocals of Rebecca Rose. It’s a voice whose hushed, sultry tone and effortless delivery that will stop you in your tracks. And it’s also a voice that floats perfectly over the hazy, delicate sound of Samana. Opener ‘Passing Me By’ fits perfectly into the ‘dreampop’ world, with gently strummed guitars, Fleetwood Mac / Albatross-esque echoing guitar lines and delicate drums which dance delicately around your ear drums. Latest single ’The Glory Of God’ follows suit, all be it with a slight americana twang to the guitars, and EP closer ’The Spirit Moving’ sounds like to could be taken from the soundtrack of a Quentin Tarantino film, riding a deep groove and filled with a devious air of suspense.”
4/5
Music News
“Melancholy Heat is a spiritual embodiment of the most important life lessons. So live freely and listen to Samana”
God Bless The Bands
“Its haunting and hypnotic in its minimalism, sitting somewhere between Tim Buckley and PJ Harvey with shades of Nick Cave and Mazzy Star”
Louder Than War
“If you feel like you need to take out your brain and put it in ice water, give Samana’s stunning new EP a listen. It’s fourteen minutes of trembling, gorgeous folk!”
Gigwise
"Samana’s music seems to exist at the meeting point of a variety of genres, one second they’re dipping their toes into the psych-folk sounds of the 1960’s, the next they’re channelling Mazzy Star-like dream pop, or twanging nods to the Delta Blues. The pair always seem to find a way to root their music into the idea of connection, their songs are stories of humanity, nature and the pursuit of understanding. Their music seems to tap into something that’s almost out of fashion in music now; a wide-eyed desire to explore freedom, the natural world and community, to tap into something bigger than the self and to find a different way to live life outside of the everyday.”
For The Rabbits
“Samana’s music, it is sewn with delicate meditative harmonies and rustling alt country instrumentation.”
God Is In The TV
“Harris’s voice, even during the quieter notes, holds such beauty and serenity, balancing deeper sombre tones against gentle fragile notes. It’s such a mesmerising and all-consuming delivery, it just stops you in your tracks.”
Folk Radio UK
“Just poignant and melancholy and beautiful as always with their music. Such beautiful songwriters”
