For this Sunday Classic, we would like to get you all to spin an incredible album that we ended up being involved with. The musical re-imagining of Mirabel Lomer.

It was June 2020 when we first heard about Mirabel “Mirry” Lomer. Besides running a record shop in isolation (and obligatory experimentations into baking bread, homeschooling children and other such peak lockdown essentials), our friend Kirsteen introduced us to a fledgling email thread titled “RE: Great Aunt Mirry”. Over the next few weeks we just fell absolutely head over heels into a project of sublime archaeology and reconceptualised beauty. We even started a record label.

The story goes; 30 years ago, Edinburgh-based musician Tom Fraser was helping with the house clearance after his grandfather’s death and found an old, scratched Transco record left out on the street. He took it home where it sat on a shelf for years, until one day during 2020’s lockdown, he gave it a play; and a whole world opened up to him. With her nephew Geoffrey, his Great Aunt Mirry had recorded a number of piano compositions which she had kept secret from her family. Tom reworked and remixed her compositions with his brother-in-law Simon Tong (The Verve, The Good the Bad and the Queen, and The Magnetic North) and together with project curator Kirsteen McNish brought the amazing music and astonishing story out of the shadows.

“Mirry” is spiritually enriching. Mirry’s piano meditations are spooky and enthralling broadcasts from the great beyond, and the way that Tom and Simon channeled her spirit of expiration and augmented it with such sensitivity is so charming. Full of delicate beauty, swooping grace and an inimitable homespun charm. It is a really beautiful record and a project that we were so proud to be involved in.

A touching and beautifully affecting album, please do discover the world of Mirry.

Further Reading

One of the most magical projects to have arrived out of 2020’s various enforced periods of reflection was Mirry, the incredible discovery and musical re-imagining of Mirabel Lomer, a carer who had secretly created piano compositions away from almost everyone else's gaze. For a feature in Delxue, we spoke to her nephew Geoffrey Drage, the man who lovingly recorded and preserved hundreds of stereoscopic slides, super-8 films, photographs, stories, poems and further recordings some seventy years ago. Read More.

The Guardian | How the lost sounds of Great Aunt Mirry were unlocked.

“Musician Tom Fraser has reclaimed a late relative’s musical legacy, thanks to the chance find of a scratchy record on a doorstep” - Laura Barton

• Available as the first pressing on black vinyl, with printed inner sleeves and 16pp booklet of archive photos.
• Digipak with booklet of archive photos.