Alex Garden and Harriet Riley

Alex Garden is a fiddle player, guitarist, composer and producer with a unique approach to instrumental music as a result of 10 years experience performing folk, classical and improvised music around the UK. Alongside regularly performing with The Drystones, Sheelanagig, Harriet Riley & Alex Garden, Tarren, Ellie Gowers and Rachael Dadd Alex is a recording artist who produces a broad variety of collaborative work from experimental electronic music to string arrangements. Alex studied music at University of Southampton, graduated in 2017 and moved to Bristol shortly after, where they have immersed themself in the city’s thriving music scene. Their longest running project The Drystones has been nominated for the BBC Young Folk Award and received an Arts Council England project grant in 2021 for a new tour in partnership with EFDSS, English Folk Expo and Halsway Manor – with a mission to involve more younger audiences in UK Folk music. Originally from Devon, Harriet grew up in a musical household and went on to study Orchestral Percussion at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She has experience in a range of genres from 8-piece jazz ensemble Tezeta to orchestral playing with BBC National Orchestra of Wales, studying gamelan in Bali to folk duo with Alex Garden. Harriet performs regularly with Spindle Ensemble, a contemporary classical quartet. Their second album, Inkling was pressed to vinyl and released by Hidden Notes Records in 2021. Harriet works in a number of dance and theatre projects playing solo percussion, most recently for children’s circus theatre company Can’t Sit Still. ‘Sonder’, released in 2020, was the debut album of a folk duo with Harriet Riley and Alex Garden. She is currently a composer and performer for Thimble Theatre and has been working freelance in Bristol since she graduated in 2014.