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I’m sat in a cow barn in Dorset with Katriona Gilmore and Jamie Roberts sat opposite. The barn is transformed into a stage every year for the intimate Purbeck Folk Festival at which Gilmore and Roberts are to play along with running a fiddle and guitar workshop. Jamie’s face sparks into a big grin as he completes the final tune of their set for a Folk Radio UK session (coming this week) beating the sound check about to kick off behind us with the Old Dance School.

FOUR STARS ****

The bold young guitar/fiddle duo follow their BBC Horizon Award nomination with a second album that complements their interest in the English tradition with US influences and strong originals. Dramatic variation – from All I’ve Known’s depressing account of modern mores, to Gilmore’s take on the supernatural ballad Fleetwood Fair – makes them different.

2010 has been a real landmark year for Katriona and Jamie, with their nomination for the BBC Radio 2 Horizon Award and their first nationwide headline tour as a duo in their own right expertly fielding the ripples cast by last year’s impressive debut CD Shadows And Half Light. Now, hot on the heels of the news that they’ve been invited to support Fairport Convention on their upcoming winter tour, comes the release of that all-important album number two.

English Roots meet Americana

Nominated for a BBC Horizon Award for best new act in 2010, and both graduates of the Leeds College of Music, where they began performing as a duo in 2006, the 20-somethings Katriona Gilmore & Jamie Roberts released a critically acclaimed debut album in 2008, Shadows & Half Light, and their second, Up From The Deep, continues their exploration of folk music’s dim-lit recesses and snugs.

Gilmore is a powerful fiddle player and Roberts’ guitar picking has geometric precision and lyrical depth, and they’re joined by a quartet of guest instrumentalists to thicken the sound and broaden its palette.

Both of these talented youngsters are already well integrated into established (and respected) bands: Jamie with Kerfuffle, Katriona with Tiny Tin Lady. But they each have an extraordinary amount to offer outside of a band context, and their teaming-up as a duo has already proved a very wise move both artistically and in terms of greater recognition of their individual talents. They’ve been leaving audiences open-mouthed with their (genuinely) exciting and unassumingly confident displays of instrumental technique, as well as showcasing some outstanding original songs (both Kat and Jamie are also very capable songwriters, and really good singers to boot).