ffolliott - Gree (LP)

Kitto Records presents Gree, the debut album from Belfast artist ffolliott. Written and recorded over 5 years in a home studio, Gree came together slowly, through a near-daily writing process. ffolliott set out to make an album at the start of 2020, working through batches of songs each week until something began to take shape. “Life was to-ing and fro-ing around me at that time and the big long staircase of making an album felt like a comforting bottomless pit I could crawl into and escape.” Early on, the sessions were open-ended, producing what he describes as “wacky, bad ffolliott music”. The turning point came with the track 'cappy', which set the tone for the rest of the record. From there, the album began to draw from a very specific set of memories from his life – pulling in fragments of childhood, family dynamics, and moments spanning from the 90s through to the present day, shaped through a DIY approach to songwriting and sample-led production. The record moves between these timelines without settling into a single narrative. Some songs sit firmly in childhood memory, others jump forward to later years, and some hold more than one thread at once. Across it all, there’s a focus on what happens behind closed doors – the things that are heard through walls, left unsaid, or overheard. Running through the album is a reflection on witnessing someone deteriorate over time, and how experiences of addiction and excess within a family environment are first absorbed as a child, then re-examined later in life. “I generally found that the more I leaned into anything I didn’t like about my music, the more I would end up writing songs that meant a lot to me.” The warm and textured sound of Gree was shaped by both the equipment and the process used to make it. Vocals and guitars were recorded through a single microphone, drums were built from samples taken from ffolliott'S own vinyl collection and sequenced on an MPC, and much of the sound comes from ageing analogue gear – tape delays and instruments collected over time. The result is a record full of life and texture: hiss, crackle and instability left in place rather than cleaned up. The world of Gree is further developed through the extensive artwork archive of the artist's late father - a prolific self-taught artist and microbiologist whose work has never been shared publicly before. The front cover features an etching from The Dream Machine, a series of 32 black-and-white works created in the midsts of 1980s Northern Ireland, while the back cover brings together unfinished doodles, sketches and drawings recovered from his notebooks and diaries, some dating back to his childhood. “A big part of the ffolliott project has always been to get my dad’s artwork seen alongside my music. I’d always admired it – it felt like something that shouldn’t just live in the house.” Throughout the album, these personal elements sit alongside smaller details – including childhood cassette recordings of Jamie and his sister staging their own improvised radio shows, recorded on a boombox in the 90s. ffolliott takes its name from the artist's middle name, passed down through one side of his family and traditionally given to the first-born son. It remains deliberately uncapitalised, retaining a spelling rooted in older family history.