Marlais

Marlais is the stage name of British musician Michael Culme Seymour, who has been living and working in Berlin since 2011. The musician first gained a following on Soundcloud with his remixes of Alt-J songs and instrumentals with folk-sampling beats. He then transferred this style to his debut EP Dreams of Jarvis, which is inspired by the literary fantasy folk worlds of Dylan Thomas, whose middle name Marlais the musician adopted as his pseudonym. In 2016, his music changed direction: his debut LP Warm at Last contains traditional ballads and songs from Britain and Ireland, sung in experimental electronic arrangements. Into these songs he incorporated a mixture of instrumental passages, slow-moving drones, swirling guitar loops and ambient experiments.

At the same time, Marlais also co-hosted We Just Met with Phil Smith at the Berlin community radio until the station went out of business. In 2019, he released the album Meeting is a Pleasure on the Stuttgart label Treibender Teppich, and in 2020, together with pianist Phil Smith, he released the EP Died For Love 2021 on the same label, which contains songs about love and broken hearts. In July 2022, Marlais self-released The Nightingales Are Drunk, which contains 10 traditional folk songs sung unaccompanied, recorded directly to tape during a residency in Tusheti, Georgia. In addition, Marlais also hosts a show on Tbilisi's Mutant Radio called Gurkenmusik.