Mesmerically skilful, oddly beautiful expressive and sometimes powerfully disturbing experimental instrumental folk and bluegrass by the debut South Carolina trio of fiddler Courtney Werner, guitarist Evan Morgan and bassist/banjoist Michael Devito, together weaving extraordinary sounds within and beyond traditional on a dark and tragic ecological theme. Pump organ and field recordings also colour their music here on an album around the impact of a South Carolina nuclear arms plant on the local landscape and the communities that once lived there. It is a musical evocation of destruction and resilience – an embrace of dissonance and tension with moments of transcendence and began with Courtney Werner’s research into the rural Savannah River Site. As she explains: “The town of Ellenton, South Carolina was the largest of the towns displaced in 1952 by the U.S. federal government to build the Savannah River Plant, which produced radioactive materials for U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The former site of Ellenton was dedicated to the extraction of heavy water while other areas of the plant focused on manufacturing weapons-grade plutonium and tritium within nuclear reactors. Heavy water is chemically altered to be denser than normal water and is incredibly expensive and time-consuming to produce, requiring 52 gallons of river water for one fluid ounce. The process was fuelled by a coal combustion powerhouse, and now the river floodplain adjacent to the remnants of Ellenton is covered by a plume of toxic coal ash.”
The interweaving sounds capture the wonder but also the fear and disturbance, with added field recordings by Jasper Lee and tape manipulation by Oliver Child-Lanning, the trio employ an entire ecosystem of music, from tender, reverent melodies to bristling harmonics to embellished soundscapes taken directly from the environment. From the valedictory, slowly unfolding opener The Death of Ellenton, drones and restless fiddle emerges with echoes of distorted voices and other indecipherable sounds into Marker of A Drowning, with crisp acoustic guitar held in dissonant longer fiddle notes. Sound Of A Million Stars has strangled, chaotic cacophony of bowing and takes its name from Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa’s short film about fallout from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Woodpeckers eerily includes sounds of the tree-knocking birds alongside ghostly playing. Where the Place Becomes Forgetting layers a counterpoint of steady, round-like guitar and banjo riffing with fraught fiddle swoops and the sounds of a pond teeming with wildlife, yet bound within the shadow of the nuclear plant. Blooms In The Rapids is a gorgeous melody intertwining guitar and violin, yet is also filled with melancholy. Tribute To The Angels sees the two instruments improvising and soloing with swirls separately yet beautifully connected, Winter Grounds and Soft and Pliable brings scratchy, fractured violin and scraped and sliding bottle guitar strings sounds in an eerie soundtrack, while closer Dog-Headed Man slowly builds into a floating, flowering beauty with a bending strings and suspended sense of the unknown with overlapping phrases. Wonderfully vivid, intricate compositions and musicianship mixing ghostly echoes of the traditional echoes and avant composition into something very special indeed. Out on Thrill Jockey.
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