A Flame Burned Pure is the first album from Django Flowers. It is a minimal lo-fi affair drawing on dark folk, blues and country, with some jazz flavours mixed with atmospheric soundscapes.

Django Flowers is the singer-songwriter moniker for Berlin-based Australian composer J. Kenny. Over the last twelve years Kenny has contributed music to short films, theatre productions, and a range of art installations shown in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea.

While his focus has been sound design, ambient music, and music to support the experience of art installations, he has penned the odd song here and there and slipping them into a drawer. A Flame Burned Pure does not contain any of these.

Instead, this set of songs was written initially over a period of three months, inspired in the early stages by watching a particular British television show about a 1920s criminal. The songs grew from there.

“I sat down and started playing very simple chord progressions and these songs about the relationships between the characters came out. Almost all the songs came out quickly and, as these things tend to go, having that frame allowed me to write some other personal verses and sneak them in under the guise of writing about these characters.”

The album was recorded in pieces in his own Berlin studio over a little more than a year. He wrote the cello arrangements and called in Anton Peys to perform the pieces. Peys also performed on Kenny’s Music For Lost Voices album. All other instruments were performed by J. Kenny.

“The concept was to keep everything as minimal as possible. I wanted the writing and arrangements to be sparse and really reflect a lot of older folk and blues records that I listen to a lot. Like Charley Patton and Leadbelly, or closer to folk like Dave van Ronk or Dylan’s World Gone Wrong. This album was meant to be stripped back and simple… then I had ideas of the atmosphere around them.”

These textures support the folk and blues inspired songs, also building the handful of instrumental tracks. included electric guitar lines, using a bow on a cymbal and on electric and acoustic guitars, wailing on a harmonica, and strange percussion including beating an out of tune autoharp with a soft mallet. It all comes together to make one atmospheric trip through finding your own feet to stand on, deals with the devil, finding and losing love, mourning, and contemplating your own mortality.

A Flame Burned Pure will be released online and through independent distribution on August 4 2026.