While their instrumentation and aesthetic may evoke parts of Appalachia and the rural South, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband (MTS) are anything but a traditional folk group. Theirs is a different kind of rootedness, one indebted to the landscape they call home, but as attuned to its ecology and environmental contours as to its social history. Since making their label debut on Thrill Jockey in 2024, the duo of Courtney Werner (fiddle) and Evan Morgan (guitar/organ) has expanded to a trio, welcoming banjoist/bassist Mike DeVito into the band. There are no vocals, yet they manage to convey complex emotions through their strange, discordant music. Heavy Water, MTS’s second release for the label, is an emotional map of a place that was lost.
Category: alternative folk
Americans are increasingly finding themselves stuck behind slamming doors separating them from other cultures and ideas. Guitarist Marisa Anderson’s efforts to counter our current sociopolitical paradigm are all about underlining the crucial, often ignored difference between un-American and anti-American. The latter defines a hostile outsider or inside agitator, but the former simply identifies whatever lies outside our national experience. And as this project makes clear, that’s something to be sought after.
In 1952, Folkways Records released quirky artistic polymath Harry Smith’s incalculably influential Anthology of American Folk Music. The collection’s rare folk, gospel, blues, and country recordings revealed to America…
Sometimes you might hear an artist described as a force of nature. It’s a figure of speech usually reserved for big or eccentric personalities, people whose artistic vision is put forward so confidently and with such power that it brooks no argument. This could be applied to the Swedish singer and musician Sara Parkman, whose fourth solo album Aster, atlas tackles the biggest themes: life, death, faith, grief, and the passage of time. But Parkman is a force of nature in another way. Her music has an inherent intensity that seems to be drawn from elemental sources. Listening to her singing and her highly original arrangements, we are constantly reminded of wild and unknown landscapes, and of our smallness within them, but also of our gardens, the things we cultivate,…
Animal Collective has always approached its records from a modular mindset, working as a literal collective of artists who operate under a shared banner. Throughout their myriad releases, some members have been absent on certain albums, and different configurations of the four players have resulted in wildly different sounds, ranging from wide-eyed folk to rave-worthy experimental electronica. Though they’ve produced music as Animal Collective previously, Croz Boyce zeroes in on the specific creative connection shared by AC members Dave Portner and Brian Weitz. It’s a sound that’s very much in keeping with the woozy psychedelia of their greater collective, but just different enough to merit its own distinction. One of the primary differences is that…
Of all the artists that emerged from the freak folk/New Weird America boom of the early noughties, Colorado-born Josephine Foster is one of the most enduring, and certainly one of the most interesting. Besides the obvious – her startling voice, opera trained but as wild as the hills – constant reinvention and inspired collaboration have been the hallmarks of her continued success.
She has tackled folk, country, desert psych, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and 19th-century German Lieder, and has teamed up with David Pajo and Andy Bar (as The Children’s Hour) and Jason Ajemian (as Born Heller). In recent years, her most fruitful collaboration has been with guitarist Victor Herrero, with whom she formed the band Mendrugo.
There’s an affectation that courses through certain parts of the musical fringe, where an artist or group’s oft-used descriptors perfectly capture what the listener might be in for. In that, they mirror the best of kitschy B-movies. There’s little doubt what films with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Blob might give you. So it goes for Houston, Texas duo Ak’chamel, Giver of Illness. The group, who have never revealed their identity, have spent years building out one of the most singular catalogues in experimental music, a strange and enthralling fusion of found sound, psychedelia, neo-folk and the deepest, eeriest recesses of the avant-garde. And their tagline of “Fourth World post-colonial cultural cannibalism” is about as faithful as an indicator can get…
The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren (Širom) finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.
The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here, best exemplified in ‘The Spirit Is Becoming a Desert’. His playing has long oscillated between reconstruction and erosion, drawing on traditions (Jewish nigunim, Middle Eastern music, and broadly…
In parts of Southern Italy, the separation between music and everyday life has only grown, as traditions have been flattened and “folklorized” into postcard versions of themselves. On their self-titled debut, Palermo collective Lero Lero push against that logic. Drawing from 20th-century Sicilian sound archives, they treat this material not as something to safeguard, but something to work through, asking what it means to inherit a tradition that has been interrupted or distorted.
Alessio Bondì, Donato Di Trapani, and Fabio Rizzo pull from agropastoral songs, laments, lullabies, and canti di sdegno, holding onto their emotional weight while driving them into new terrain. Though their process starts at the source — learning the songs, the shapes of the melodies,…
“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more nebulous direction.
The centuries-old melody makes a brief appearance as the album opens, played by a calling trumpet amongst howling winds and seafaring atmospherics — but then Redmond slowly but surely breaks apart every preexisting sonic element into stirring ambient layers that fold, morph, crystallize, and shatter across four distinct, extended musical “scenes.” The result is an album that feels almost defined like a narrative story…
Formlessness comes in many forms. There is a loose category of music that seems to shift without any noticeable movement, that gathers in dark pools or drifts in gaseous clouds, and we tend to call that music ‘ambient’. But ambient covers a lot of ground these days: beatless music often displays psychedelic or folk influences, elements of musique concrete, field recording or free improvisation. It’s less a genre and more a kind of abstract moodboard, and as such its practitioners are sometimes guilty of a lack of focus, of throwing too much at the wall, or else too little.
But in the right hands, it can be incredibly potent. Gayle Brogan, the mastermind behind Pefkin, understands the fluidity and adaptability of ambient music better than most. A prolific…
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was touring with Mount Eerie. Comment sections and message boards couldn’t contain her, and now in filth is seeing a much-deserved official release through experimental indie powerhouse AD 93.
Zuniga’s songs are alluring largely thanks to their otherworldly patina: simple compositions built around voice, guitar, and synth, filtered through tape hiss so they feel like alien transmissions. (In reality, the songs were captured between…
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Connor Armbruster excels at reinvention. The multi-instrumentalist based in Troy, New York, has released numerous albums over the past several years that tackle a wealth of styles and themes. Phonehenge (2019) was a folk concept album about technology. Masses (2022) consisted of a solo violin recorded in the sanctuary of an empty church. Can I Sit Here (2024) tackled distortion and noise rock. He even released an EP last year, Bednight Snack, consisting entirely of traditional songs he regularly sang to his daughter.
Now, with Half My House, Armbruster tackles traditional Irish music, a somewhat more conventional release, but still imbued with the grace and skill he’s known for.
Joining Armbruster (who sings, plays violin,…
Saputjiji, the new album from Tanya Tagaq, opens with a series of blood-curdling screams. “Fuck war,” she bellows, over and over, delivering each word with the seismic force of an Arctic cryoseism. Tagaq’s paroxysm of fury is brutally cathartic — a vicious rebuke to the widespread moral apathy and cowardice of our current moment, from tepid protest songs to mealy-mouthed pleas to keep politics out of art. As missiles rain death from the sky across the Middle East, her words are a galvanizing blast of icy wind, stinging our eyes and forcing them to adjust their focus.
This is, of course, completely on brand for Taqag, a multidisciplinary Inuk artist whose work has always been grounded in radical politics, and whose art has always coursed with…
Czech guitarist Jakub Šimanský identifies himself with the “American Primitive” genre, evoking in his picking and sometimes in his song titles figures from Fahey and Basho to Rose and Bachmann. He does so with tongue in cheek, though; his previous releases were titled Face to Face Against American Primitivism Vol. 1 and 2. What Do You Mean by That? his third full-length solo release, demonstrates his progress as both a player and a composer. The ten taut tunes, all under five minutes in length, are rich with melody and dazzling fingerpicking. Šimanský reminds us of the inexhaustible potential of just one person and (with one exception) an acoustic guitar.
The focus here is on the six-string. “Knife Thrower,” “Cannoneer,” “Devshirme,” and…
Drueling is a first for each of its participants, and quite possibly the world. It is a sequence of improvised duets between two shahi baaja players, Turner Williams Jr. and Derek Monypeny. Neither had jammed with a like-equipped player before, and if there’s another record of one, it’s flying below the radar of readily available search engines. So, let’s just say that this LP is the first, and if a genre is to ensue, it’s off to a good start.
Monypeny is based in California, where he’s carved out a solo career playing desert-kissed electric music on guitar and shahi baaja following early involvement with the groups Alto and Oaxacan, as well as membership in Sir Richard Bishop’s Freak of Araby band. Williams is an Alabama-born visual and musical artist who has played…
Athens, Georgia, guitarist Shane Parish isn’t one to shy away from a challenge (he transcribed the whole of Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars and plays as one of the Orcutt quartet), and his output is always something special, as 2024’s Repertoire, another album demanding some serious arrangement work, demonstrated. However, for his latest album, Autechre Guitar, he takes on the music of English electronic duo Autechre, an outfit known for its unconventional time signatures and experimental approach, which is a tricky task, to say the least.
Seemingly unwilling to disappoint his wife, who is a big fan of Autechre’s music, Shane set out to re-imagine and arrange ten of the band’s songs, all taken from their 1990s output.
Divided by Dusk is a mysterious, otherworldly album that sounds like a folktale and feels like walking into the forest just as the sun is setting, not knowing what wonders may await. Will one encounter enchanting creatures, gypsy caravans, a traveling circus ~ or the simple magic of fox and bear, moonlight and stream?
Inspired by trips to Japan yet informed by her native Poland, Magda Drozd casts her spell with violin, field recordings, electronics and voice, with Japanese flutist Rai Tateishi entering the forest as the sun disappears behind the trees, merging both sonic worlds.
The violin’s opening notes are already reverberant, echoes wafting through the pines, caught in a strange vortex. A hum falls…
In 2024, Georgia-based guitarist, composer, and improviser Shane Parish released Repertoire, an album of 14 covers on solo acoustic guitar. The songs were mostly from forward-thinking jazz composers – Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, among others – along with interpretations of songs by the likes of the Minutemen, Captain Beefheart, and Aphex Twin thrown in for good measure. The result is a gorgeous puzzle of acoustic recordings that brought together unique compositions interpreted by a fearless soloist.
Now, with Solo at Café OTO, Parish has created something of a companion piece, swapping out the acoustic guitar for a Squier Telecaster electric, and covering a variety of compositions…
Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them — excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though…