Haiku Salut

Formed in Derbyshire in 2010, the instrumental trio Haiku Salut weaves together electronic, post-rock, folk, and dream pop elements. Their approach draws from the neo-classical leanings of Múm, Yann Tiersen, and Benoît Charest while also taking cues from Haruki Murakami’s impressionistic prose. The group unveiled its debut album Tricolore in 2013, a work whose layered arrangements already hinted at the cinematic scope that would define later releases. Subsequent records—Etch and Etch Deep (2015), There Is No Elsewhere (2018), The General (2019), and The Hill, The Light, The Ghost (2021)—expanded this palette, merging acoustic instruments with electronic textures to construct detailed, film-like sound environments.

Multi-instrumentalists Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, and Louise Croft established the project that same year and issued the EP How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb in 2011. Two years later they delivered their first full-length, the widely praised Tricolore. After claiming the Green Man Rising prize in 2013, the trio supported innovative Celtic folk outfit Lau on a U.K. tour. Etch and Etch Deep arrived as their second album in 2015. In 2017 the group contributed to Public Service Broadcasting’s Every Valley, then returned with the third studio set There Is No Elsewhere in 2018. The following year brought The General, an eighty-minute soundtrack composed for Buster Keaton’s 1923 silent classic of the same title, and in 2021 they released the naturalistic fifth album The Hill, The Light, The Ghost.