Fundamentally, SYML is a singer-songwriter project from Seattle’s Brian Leseney Fennell, a piano and a toque that doesn’t quite cover his ears. His career began as a frontman for an emotive indie-rock band named after the city of love, Barcelona, and performing low-tempo songs about loving and leaving. Going solo, the effect is similar, but focused, softening the rhythms and clearing out the high frequencies for warm instrumental beds to centre the clear expressions of complex emotions.

SYML means ‘simple’ in Welsh, an ode to his biological parentage and also a near-perfect descriptor for his sensibility – clean, evocative and easy to understand – without feeling entirely familiar. With softly strummed guitars, warm wavering synths, distant percussion and Fennell’s handsome voice, often dipping into a confident falsetto, SYML is for finer feelings with fewer frills. In soft arpeggios into scintillating swells, he brings clarity and texture into emotions you didn’t know were so familiar.

A classically-trained pianist, his piano compositions are perhaps nearly as ubiquitous as his yearning pop songs. The wistful “I Wanted to Leave,” in particular, becomes the central musical motif behind the sultry voice of Lana Del Ray on her “Paris, Texas.”

A soloist at the core, SYML is a consummate collaborator and his songs stay alive through iteration in an entirely contemporary way. Perhaps his most ubiquitous song is “Where’s My Love,” a mysterious and beautiful plea to an absent lover, made only more magical with the vocal consummation of Carla Morrison.

Make way for warm waves of fleeting feelings, a perfect catharsis for a Fest well folked.

- Liam Prost