Ahead of his UK tour in May 2023 (with C Joynes, details below), Mike Gangloff talks about taking Appalachian fiddle music into new spectrums. A founding member of Pelt and The Black Twig Pickers, Gangloff has also collaborated with guitar aces, Steve Gunn and Jack Rose. His latest solo album, Evening Measures, was released by VHF Records in 2022.
It is mid-day in Ironto, Virginia. Mike Gangloff has spent the morning taking a leisurely walk, drinking coffee and preparing for this interview. He was working until late the previous night on a piece of journalism. For years he’s also been a newspaper reporter, covering the doings of his local communities, both environmental and governmental. Gangloff says, “More recently I’ve written mostly about crime, spending a lot of time in courts listening to people discuss the poor choices they’ve made with often catastrophic consequences.”
Ironto is what’s called an unincorporated community, without elected officials. Gangloff tells me it’s the remnants of a village that once had more houses and churches, with a Grist Mill around which the place was built. He says, “I ended up here twenty years ago, looking for somewhere to buy and liked this area near Blacksburg. There’s a science university there and it’s surrounded by present day Appalachian culture which makes for an interesting contrast. We’re in the mountains, in the little bend of a river, the north fork of the Roanoke river. We’re enclosed on three sides by rivers and a big range of the Pedlar hills. There’s a lot of water and mud and rock.”
A sense of these natural elements has seeped into Gangloff’s work down the years, whether through the archaic drone noise of Pelt, the pastoral shindigs of The Black Twig Pickers, or his earthy solo outings. From feedback to fiddle tunes, from ragas to rustics, his music spans multiple senses of the Appalachian epithet. Some of his projects invite active participation, while others are born of contemplation, even isolation.
Gangloff hails from Lexington, Kentucky, a town famed for its horse farms and thoroughbred racetracks. But with his father in the navy, the family didn’t live there long, as Lexington’s a long way from the coast. “My dad was a church singer and my mum played several instruments,” Gangloff recalls. “Their tastes ran mainly to classical music and heavy Bach organ stuff. I started playing guitar aged eight and music has always been part of my life.” Gangloff has performed, or recorded, on the standard fiddle, octave fiddle, Hardanger-style fiddle, Shruti box, percussion, banjo and singing bowl. But that’s not all, as he relates: “On my album with Steve Gunn, Melodies For A Savage Fix, I played an esraj which is close to a sarangi or bowed sitar but simpler than either. Before that on the Pelt record Empty Bell Ringing In The Sky we played electric guitars, an old tube organ and a bowed acoustic between us. That was the end of our experiments using the shehnai, a double-reed Indian instrument. Jack Rose and I used to play them in tandem, squalling away.”
Rose was a close friend and bandmate of Gangloff’s in Pelt before his untimely death in 2009. As a fingerstyle and lap steel guitarist, Rose released a bunch of remarkable solo records and collaborations. Gangloff recalls, “Pelt were on the bill for a show in L.A. once with a stack of other bands. We arrived after a long journey to find they’d changed the running order and we were too late to play. We had a big set-to with the promoters and eventually they paid us to just leave. Jack was like, ‘We’re here in L.A. and they’re afraid of us because we’re from Virginia. They think we’re gonna shoot them.’ It was such a funny perception for him to have. The first time I saw Jack play he was working in Richmond, Virginia as the delivery driver for a sandwich shop. It had an upstairs bar that became a music venue. One night I was there chatting with a band setting up when Jack came in. He knew one of the musicians who handed him an electric guitar and Jack sat on the stage playing a solo version of Like A Hurricane. The whole room fell silent as he wailed away on this thing, then handed back the guitar and ran off to make his next sandwich delivery.”
Only weeks before he passed away, Rose had toured the UK with Gangloff in The Black Twig Pickers. Gangloff himself has greatly enjoyed his UK and Irish travels down the years. “There’s a direct link between traditional music of the British Isles and from my part of the world. When in Ireland it was interesting to play what I’d call old-time music with fiddler Tóla Custy, who’d say he knew a variation on my tune then add a harmony part. Once in Newcastle with Phil and Cath Tyler, I was playing a song and Phil said it was a Northumbrian tune, just with a different title. Taking music out of its home setting and playing to different audiences shifts the sounds into new paths. Also, I’m a big walker in rural areas, so Ireland and the UK are great places for that. Some truly stunning scenery, then sitting around in pubs. It’s a different enough culture to be interesting for an American, but it’s extremely similar with many echoes back and forth.”
It was partly thanks to Cath Tyler that Gangloff discovered shape note singing – songs written in shapes, not notes, for ease of sight reading. He says, “The shape note event at Newcastle Tusk Festival was my first real experience of sitting among a large group doing it. Shape note is far more exciting than the strait-laced Presbyterian hymnals I grew up with. It’s such an ocean of sound, where the syllables are more interesting than the words.”
The science of sound is something that fascinates Gangloff. “In the years playing with Pelt we lived in a very sonic area instead of focussing on theoretical coherence. We delved into pure noise and a lot of traditional music is close to that. My appreciation was tuned by exceptional musicians I was fortunate enough to interact with. Folks like Donald Miller, Richard Bishop, Tony Conrad, plus the Sonic Youth and Dead C people. The first musician to take me into real old-time music was the veteran fiddler Coolidge Winesett, who played with a screechy ear-curling rasp. It just sounded great to me.”
Gangloff holds up his Hardanger-style fiddle and plucks it. “So, we have our standard four playing strings here, then the bridge is raised such that there’s five sympathetic strings below. If they’re tuned closely the instrument’s reverberation will sound the sympathetic strings. It does broaden the tone a lot, it’s like an in-built reverb. It creates an ‘in the well sound’ and rises on certain notes. I’ve long been hunting for a multiple voice approach with one instrument like this. I’m interested in resonance of various sorts and in polyphonic playing, especially the third voice effect when something manifests that isn’t being directly played. One example would be the fiddling of Melvin Wine – in some of his songs that have multi-string bowing, I hear what sound like voices behind the music, almost in another room.”
Gangloff is chatting from his office den at home with a backdrop of prints, photos and books. He explains one concert poster for Tatsuya Nakatani, a percussionist from Japan often based in America. “He does a gong orchestra show, travelling with a big truck of twelve very large gongs. You get community volunteers learning to play these gongs by day, with Nakatani’s conducting system, then he puts on a show that night with the ensemble. My wife Cara and I were part of the gong orchestra once.”
Currently reading a biography of John Coltrane, Gangloff has rediscovered Terry Pratchett and ploughed through all twelve volumes of A Dance To The Music Of Time. “I’ve read a lot about Buddhism at various points and dived into Gurdjieff. I grew up in a Christian church, but have lately reflected on how destructive that is to many people within my own circles. It can become such a mechanism for control or dominance and get in the way of personal expression.”
As for his recent listening, he cites guitarist Liam Grant, Elkhorn’s album On The Whole Universe In All Directions, Magic Tuber Stringband’s Tarantism record and the Powers/Rolin Duo. Gangloff says, “It’s wonderful to hear younger and newer players mixing and matching in their own ways, but still keeping those roots elements that speak to me the most.”
Mike Gangloff & C Joynes UK tour dates, 2023
Sun 14th May Nottingham: JT Soar
Mon 15th May Hereford: The Victory
Tues 16th May Bristol: Friendly Records
Weds 17th May Wirksworth: The Feather Star
Thurs 18th May Shipley: The Triangle
Fri 19th May Todmorden: The Golden Lion
Sun 21st May Sheffield: Bishops’ House
Mon 22nd May Cambridge: Thrive c/o Crushing Death & Grief
Tues 23rd May London: The Tin Tabernacle
Order Evening Measures here: https://vhfrecords.bandcamp.com/album/evening-measures