BIMM Introducing: Miriam Franklin

Words: Gery Hristova

After numerous performances, including headlining at Loud in London O2 Islington, in 2020, 22-year-old BIMM London production student Miriam Franklin has finally released her debut EP ‘Folding Days’, which depicts the love affair between poetry and music.

Divested of its atmospheric arrangement, the four tracks of ‘Folding Days’ would not have felt out of place on a major artist’s more orchestral-oriented album: impressionistic and emotionally resonant but rich with detail and witty asides.

Yet each piece is subtle and compelling. There is a shared resonance between the four pieces of music and something surprising and new emerges with each listen. Opening with the lilting acoustic melody of ‘Pink Lemonade’, a slow-burner that sees Franklin consider her past and present. It’s followed by ‘Holy’ and ‘Creed’, which sound highly reminiscent of Lana Del Ray’s elegant and complex manner of storytelling. ‘Folding Days’ concludes with ‘Enid’s Moon’, where an unrelenting violin drives the tune into floor-filling euphoria. The songs are an immersive aural soundtrack that conjures up images more vivid than anything a motion picture could provide thanks to Franklin’s soothing voice, some birdsong, guitar strings and violin. In this way, the album describes a slow-motion explosion, which seems to follow an almost symphonic structure.

The musical imagery in the slow-fast scheme certainly conveys the heightened, almost vivid immediacy of surrealism, with Franklin’s voice often pushed to expressive extremes, radiating desire and longing with every vibration.

That balance between adult contemporary orchestral grittiness and self-conscious soundscape of textures makes the record especially endearing. “Eerie and just so beautiful,” commented DJ Dean Jackson of Radio Prudhoe last year. Right now, ‘Folding Days’ feels like a warm breeze in the depths of a miserable winter.

Hear the original version of ‘Pink Lemonade’, the lead-off track to ‘Folding Days’ here: