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bigger division, at least musically in before and after. I mean, there's the rock and roll era with
Elvis. That's certainly a big one, but maybe that one in 62/64 was even bigger. And then, of course,
in culture around 88 or 89, with rap music really coming into the mainstream, there was another
big one that resonates today as well.

BiTS: So tell me what you're working on at the moment, Ian.

IB: Well, we're working on a lot of stuff. We are very superstitious, I would say about talking
about what we've done until it's done, meaning until it's out and done. But we've been very
fortunate to do what we do and to continue to do what we do, and we felt a certain urgency. Our
daughter is 6 years old, and we felt a certain urgency to record a lot before she started school.
So somehow that, with the COVID
lockdowns ended up working in our

favour, where things kind of never
stopped in terms of releases. And as
soon as COVID reopened, we felt an
urgency to go out there and do it
because we didn't know how long
this is going to last. So we went out
and did quite a few recordings and in
Rwanda and in Botswana, which
have come out recently and
Azerbaijan, where there was all the
additional hurdles and expense of
having to be tested, sometimes four
or five times for a single trip – before
you’d go, when you get there, after
you've been there a few days, before
you leave, when you get back all that
stuff. But you know, we felt an
urgency. And so we've been fortunate
enough to continue, but we just got
back from WOMAD and the WOMAD
festival with Saramaccan Sound (Suriname), which were the first artists there ever at the festival
in 41 years from Suriname, and they play incredible folk music. I always compare them to if Merle
Haggard had been raised in the Amazon versus Bakersfield. And I really believe it's that. It's the

other American folk music, in this case, South American and roots music. And you know, there
is a great record, a second record, a follow-up record by the Amazing United Kingdom poet
Raymond Antrobus, who's a Ted Hughes award-winning Knighted poet and one of the greatest
poets of his generation. And so a new album is coming out, “An Investigator Of Missing Sounds”.
That's coming out this month, later this month. Saramaccan Sound (Suriname)’s full album, their
single came out in July, but their full album will come out early next year. I believe in February.

BiTS: That's wonderful. Thank you very much indeed for that. Just one more question about the
experience of recording in Parchman. Is there any stuff that you have not released yet which is
releasable?

IB: There is. I mean, even though there were the limits in terms of time in particular and
equipment, there is additional material and because we did record almost the entire time, even
though it was a short amount of time. For me, one of the signs, as we talked about earlier, that
something is really powerful is when you feel it, you know, in your gut, in your heart on your