Magnified, Beatrix Players, LP

Beatrix Players are a London-based all-female trio who make florid, adventurous music that operates at the interface between folk, singer-songwriter acoustica, prog and quasi classical baroque chamber pop. There is a light, translucent quality to the music, and yet when it is not being hushed and reverent, it has the attack and thrust, the surging dynamism, of rock. It can be soft and intimate, but it can also be fiery and intense, epic and immense. There are tempestuous passages in their music that you can imagine being delivered by traditional rock instrumentation but it is the very absence of guitars and drums that means that there is nobody out there quite like them. Beatrix Players' music is sung, and largely performed, by Amanda Alvarez (cello), Jess Kennedy (piano, backing vocals) and Amy Birks (lead and backing vocals), with a little help from friends on violin and double-bass. Beatrix Players are getting used to acclaim, and all manner of genre names being ascribed to what they do, from modern folk and baroque exotica to dark classical pop. They have been written about in Prog magazine, but they could easily be featured in Folk Roots or MOJO as well as Classical Music given their chamber music influences which come through in their song structures and arrangements, focused as they are on cello, violin, double-bass and piano. 'People try to fit us in a box, but we don't fit in any box,' says Amanda. 'They struggle with that.'