Songs for Lost Travellers is an album that will make you feel. Riven with grief and anger, strafed with slivers of hope, it addresses the thinking person’s sense of grief and ennui at the current global malaise. Home-made and lo-fi is the MO here, the rawer and more intimate sounding the acoustics, the more authentic, it’s implied, is the message. 14 tracks called things like ‘Time Will Come’, ‘Question or Consume’ and ‘Tell Me Lies’ - the album’s first single, all languorous hums and couch-sat strums - are take-it-or-leave-it first takes. It’s outlier folk, jazz and rap music, inner-city decompressure (sic), by collaborators whose respective career paths have crossed for the greater good. Confucius MC is a South London singer/rapper/educator with conscious vocals and charismatic heft. Bastien Keb is a prodigious multi-instrumentalist and TV/film composer given to downbeat anti-ballads and off kilter instrumentals. The combined melancholy of their bittersweet aesthetics is mantra-like, meditative, its whirling undercurrents and impressions of static motion buoyed by horn and strings and the meditative end-blows of Kofi Flexxx, and by the negative space carved by the absence of drums. Found sounds and samples of family members - Keb’s son reads from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on ‘Paramount’, and both his cousin and mother play sax - add to the bijou, music box vibe.