fol-de-rose is a limited edition CD EP from Katie Rose featuring new and unusual arrangements of old and unusual songs.

Katie Rose had an early introduction to English folk music. "As a child, Kathleen Ferrier seemed to be  the quintessential expression of a proper English Lady, second only to the Queen. Her rendition of Blow the Wind Southerly was embedded in my early memory, along with the music of Vaughan Williams, which both my parents love."

Having sung from an early age, Katie Rose decided at the age of fifteen that she wanted to explore voice as a therapeutic tool. She developed a fascination with performance as social ritual whilst studying Theatre, and went on to explore the therapeutic aspects of sound with practitioners including Don Conreaux, Michael Ormiston & Candida Valentino and Nikki Slade. She has offered performances and workshops at festivals including Glastonbury, Big Chill, Big Green Gathering, Small World, One World and at venues in London and Istanbul.

Along the way she has collected a repertoire of songs from a variety of musical traditions -including Pagan songs, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist chants and her own original material -which feature in her first album The Singing Tree(2009). When she found herself living in the house of a folk music obsessive, she began experimenting with traditional songs and the unexpected result was fol-de-rose which includes a tampuri drone under the last track.

"All music is medicinal in that it performs a vital social role in reflecting back to humanity its stories, themes and struggles. Folk songs, like Grimm's fairytales or Greek tragedy, bring us face to face with the great themes of life -Love, Lust, Loss, etc -in an often grisly or macabre way. They expose the pain and struggle involved in life, yet in doing so enable us to reach for some sort of transcendent understanding. Often paradoxical, they gesture towards an acceptance of the mystery inherent in life's processes -that 'many a dark and cloudy day turns out to be a bright sunshiny day.'"