We recently reviewed Six Static Scenes, an album by Jacken Elswyth that was originally recorded for Cafe OTO’s digital-only Takuroku label, and is now being given a full physical and digital release by the wonderful Neolithic Recordings.
In his album review, Thomas Blake says “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.”
He concludes: “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.”
Alex Neilson (who also recently released Mouthful of Earth on Neolotihic Records) wrote the liner notes for the album that also tap into these ‘minor musical errata’.
“Folk music is a mongrel breed. Unreliable. Malleable. Promiscuous. The most exciting moments happen in its imperfections. The grit and grain of the old voices and their idiosyncratic ornamentations. The unintentional shifts in pitch. The untutored relationships to their instruments. The misheard lyric. The personality of the performer bringing out all the elemental, carnal beauty of the text- as if leavening a trowel under the mossy rock of our collective memory and showing us what’s writhing beneath.
“Thank Jack-in-the-Green then for banjo player, Jacken Elswyth, who is so fluent in the tradition that she immediately evokes most of its major contributors (Roscoe Holcomb, Dink Roberts, Margaret Barry, Dock Boggs) while bringing something new to the conversation. In fact, she has more in common with avant-hillbilly Henry Flynt in terms of zoning in on the most abstruse details of folk-form and amplifying them into hypnotic prayers. Foregrounding the shadow-drone that underpins all folk song and manifesting it as a devotional pulse. Using repetition and pattern-shift like the warp and weft of a weaver at their loom. Her banjo cogitating and coagulating like memories tunnelling into apprehension.”
Jacken has put together a playlist that inspired her during the process of creating Six Static Scenes. You’ll find recordings from Topic Records’ widely-acclaimed and seminal traditional British folk music series Voice of the People mingling alongside the likes of English avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey who died in 2005. Guardian jazz critic John Fordham wrote that Bailey “was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers – or maybe any at all.”
I also wanted to share this video of Jacken performing Waggoner’s lad on a fretless mountain banjo that she made. The neck and middle ring are walnut, while the front and back plates of the body are tulipwood, and the headstock veneer is sycamore. You can check her dedicated website for this work here, and I strongly recommend you take a look; they really are quite beautiful.
Order Six Static Scenes via Bandcamp
Website: https://www.jackenelswythmusic.com/
Upcoming dates
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
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