PATRON saint of pastoral England he may be, but Nick Drake has had his romanticist say (he died 30 years ago this month). A new pining voice, Gravenhurst, is portraying an English landscape of barren trees, a place of despair, ennui and fear.

That sense of dread has deepened in the gap between his two albums, last spring's Flashlight Seasons and the six-track Black Holes In The Sand, released this week by Warp.

Gravenhurst, alias Nick Talbot, has added feedback, distorted organs and drones to his melodious soundscape, and his folk songs have become all the more beautiful yet disturbing in their increasingly gothic strangeness.

On Tuesday, Talbot plays solo (with "various noise-making electronic devices" for company) at Fibbers in York, a nocturnal urban setting for his dark tales of winter moons, still waters and black holes.

He lives in the city but dwells on the country and suburbia. "I moved to Bristol from Surrey in 1996: a very good decision, probably the most fundamental decision in my life. Surrey is a wealthy and suspicious place with nothing but its prettiness to recommend it," he says.

"It's been ruined by fat-necked idiots driving around in BMWs. There's lots of carnal thuggery that you don't get in cities, whereas in Bristol you get bartering for drugs."

Bristol's music scene was a magnet too. "Yeah, it was a big influence before I got here. Bands from the 1990s; Third Eye Foundation and Flying Saucer Attack's Dave Preece: he was doing his noisy folk thing before anyone else. Flying Saucer Attack's album, Distance, was the first truly lo-fi record I heard; so lo-fi, so atmospheric, and I thought, if someone can make that on a four-track and put it out on vinyl, then there are no limits," Nick says.

There is a sense of mystery to Gravenhurst, even in that choice of name.

"Gravenhurst turns out to be some real dump of a town in Ontario, Canada. I don't know anything about the place; I took the name from a song by Pullman, a Chicago collective featuring Papa M. It was really beautiful and mysterious and sounded like a place, even though I didn't know that, and I felt I wanted to construct an alternative world that was away from our bloody awful world, away from my neurosis," he says.

Gravenhurst, Fibbers, York, November 9. Tickets: £5 advance, £6 door.

Updated: 16:01 Thursday, November 04, 2004