The Vengeful Cousins is an ever-expanding project seeking to bring in voices and stories in any language worldwide. But it is also a circle of friends living far from each other who keep alive their love of making music together by finding or making ballads old and new, and recording and publishing them as things of new beauty. It is an ancient project, enabled by the age of the Internet.

The Vengeful Cousins began life as a COVID-era project of multi-instrumentalist Claude Cahn working with the Berlin-based Joe Armstrong and Marcus Fister, and Ports of Call Music founder Mark Mulholland. As of today, more than 30 people have been involved in the Vengeful Cousins, including 17 musicians, sound engineers in 5 countries, and video artists from Bangladesh, Germany, Mexico, Morocco, Switzerland and the United States.

The songs recorded by Vengeful Cousins are inevitably of diverse type. Some songs are ballads in the old sense of the word: songs which tell a story with a moral, about a person who comes to a bad end because they went astray. There are of course murder ballads, including ones of regret and remorse, as well as the other kind. There are sea shanties. There are songs from the great age of 20th century political songs. There are songs on the line of the ballad tradition and other song types, such as laments of longing, homesickness or grieved love. There are narratives of destitution and bitter end. Several are own compositions of the performer. Some are hundreds of years old. Some are stories which have maybe lost some narrative over time, dragged over borders and across oceans, addled by trauma and alcohol, adjusted and re-adjusted by crossing traditions. Most are mainly a good yarn: serious, weird, dark, sentimental, picturesque or snarky.

What have we learned? We are still living the great 20th century legacy of poets, bards, instrumentalists, librarians, historians and archivists who have created a vast wealth of music we have around us now. We cannot see clearly the huge songwriting legacy of the past two centuries, because we are still carried on that tide. Out of this wonderful mess we are trying to create something new, and at the same time to honor the genius of those who have come before us.

The first Vengeful Cousins record, “Where Have You Been”, was issued in 2023 and the second Vengeful Cousins record, “Return from Faraway Lands” is available from 31 October 2025.

Due to the nature of the current music economy, we have sunk large amounts of our own money into this project, and have also benefited from the generosity of a huge amount of contributed time from friends. We will likely never recoup these sunk costs. However, if you think this project is valuable, then please purchase one or both of the Vengeful Cousins records.

We are always looking to expand the countries, traditions, languages and gender diversity. There is no limit as to type of instrumentation, genre or sound. We will not however include songs which incite hatred, discrimination or violence. Return from Faraway Lands features eight musicians and two languages not previously featured in this project.