Joel Nicholson has just packed the removal cases, his guitar and the instruments. It’s good that his music is so easy to transport from one place to another, between the places and to the people. Once, the 22-year-old Briton has described the cast list of his intimate band as “me and my bedroom”. In Manchester the songs of Butcher the Bar fill a small house now. But soon these walls won’t be the single ones in which they live.

Melancholy, deceleration and reduction are Joel Nicholson’s musical topics. Folk and postfolk, old and new heroes (Nick Drake, Paul Simon but also Sufjan Stevens), searching, finding and letting go.