You think you know folk music and then someone like Jim Moray comes along to Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan on Wednesday 21 May at 7.30pm.

He comes bearing Skulk, a fifth album of soulful English music, plus a sheaf of industry awards and the wherewithal to locate folk music in its rightful landscape: the modern world. In Jim’s vision, the oral tradition is electrified, not only technically but emotionally.

Fact is, folk music as it was constituted by the English revivalists of the 1950s and early 1960s was an historical blip. A sort of digression. Folk was never intended for ideological scrutiny, never conceived to be the subject of research, never sung as a corrective to the vanities of modernity. Folk has always belonged to the modern world.

Jim Moray sees pop, rock and folk all as parts of the same musical world – because they are. He has known no other way to think about music. From his debut, BBC Folk Award-winning album in 2003, Sweet England, through Jim Moray (2006), Low Culture (2008: fRoots Critics Poll Best Album Award-winner and Mojo Folk Album of the Year) and In Modern History (2010), Moray’s career has been a continuous avowal of folk’s relevance to contemporary life and its total indivisibility from the impulses which shape the very best rock and pop. He deploys beatboxes and melodeons, electric guitars and thumb pianos, mandolins and rappers.

He sings with the kind of English soul which has no home century.

Tickets for Jim Moray at Theatr Mwldan on Wednesday 21 May at 7.30pm are £13 (£12) and are available to book from Theatr Mwldan’s Box Office on 01239 621200, online at www.mwldan.co.uk, or via smart phone by visiting mwldan.ticketsolve.com/mobile