Still unknown over here, in her native Austria singer and guitarist Mira Lu Kovacs has released two albums with her three-piece band, featuring Walter Singer on double-bass and Christian Grobauer on drums, receiving an Amadeus (the Austrian equivalent of the Brits) by public vote. What makes this popularity so remarkable is that Schmieds Puls’ music is hardly populist, but a very subtle and sparsely arranged mix of sometimes brutally intimate words and unusual harmonies, all held together by Kovacs’ extraordinary voice and inventive finger-picking technique, making this trio such a quietly powerful live act.

https://soundcloud.com/schmiedspuls

Having launched his new album “Not Your Door” at SJQ at the end of June, Canterbury-based returns 3 months on with his two-piece band. He may have grown up in Vienna, but “Robert Rotifer couldn’t sound more English if he tried. He specialises in Ray Davies-style narrative songs, delivered in a pleasingly flat Robyn Hytchcock voice, with heart-wrenching chord changes pitched somewhere between XTC and the Beatles.” (Uncut)