Jacken Elswyth
Six Static Scenes
Neolithic Recordings
2022
There is an innate disparity in folk music that has been written about at great length. On one side are convention, tradition, the conservation of antique forms and the obscure preoccupation with formal purity and historical accuracy. On the other end of the rope is experimentation, which takes on the guise of modernisation, willful change or sheer outré weirdness. That some of the very best contemporary folk music is born from the tension created by the intersection of those two apparently warring factions shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but it often does. Perhaps music created from such tensions is by its nature startling. This is certainly the case with Jacken Elswyth, a banjo player whose compositions lean heavily on the tunes of old-time big-hitters like Dock Boggs and Dink Roberts but are delivered in a musical language that is experimental in the most contemporary sense.
Elswyth is fascinated by the minor musical errata, the strange slips and the unconventional stylistic tics that appear in recordings of old banjo music, and the compositions that make up Six Static Scenes all play on these twitches and peculiarities. She is an unspooler of musical tangles, and the resulting lattices of sound can seem either meticulously ordered or thrillingly loose. Scene 1 riffs on a fragment of Hobart Smith’s well-known rendition of Arkansas Traveller. It seems to writhe and mutate within its confines and comes to rest on an insistent drone.
Elswyth’s technique is the musical equivalent of conceptual poetry, specifically the type that utilises appropriation or partial erasure of texts. These pieces are, in a way, like Duchamp’s readymades or George Perec’s exercises in constraint. But they never seek to parody their own sources or to undermine the native beauty in the originals. There is a sympathetic and highly knowledgeable hand at work which elevates each composition beyond artistic conceit. Scene 2, for example, lovingly recreates Dock Boggs’ Coal Creek March, focusing on its idiosyncratic intro, and manages to turn it into something highly personal, a highwire act between melody and cacophony.
She has developed an inimitable style which is evidently the result of close listening and genuine love, both for her instrument and her banjo-playing forebears. Dink Roberts gets the treatment on Scene 3: a tight, rhythmic tune that is, for want of a better word, groovy. Scene 4 unfolds over two distinct parts; the first is intricately fingerpicked and builds into a detailed tapestry with an improvisational feel, while the second uses bowed strings to weave a minimal, delicate pattern over a throb of background drone. Scene 5 is more frenetic, largely dispensing with the drone that underpins many of the other tracks in favour of a more expressionistic approach which Elswyth admits was inspired by Captain Beefheart’s guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo, while Scene 6, based on a piece by the Irish Traveller musician Margaret Barry, is more reflective but still refreshingly experimental, using the original’s naturally off-key elements to create a wonderfully wonky structure.
Six Static Scenes works beautifully as an exercise in controlled chaos and hectic minimalism, and also as a modernist interpretation of an antiquated form. But if you look deeper, it represents something perhaps more important: it is a celebration of the other, the road not taken, and as such, it shows just how much scope there is for finding new and unrestricted paths in folk music.
Order Six Static Scenes via Bandcamp
Website: https://www.jackenelswythmusic.com/
Upcoming dates
29th-30th July 2022: Unwedding
w/ Shovel Dance Collective
12-14th August 2022: Supernormal Festival
w/ Shovel Dance Collective
25th August 2022: Kingsplace, Kings Cross
w/ Shovel Dance Collective & Broadside Hacks
29th October 2022: The Green Note, Camden
Solo, with Gwennifer Raymond