Last month, Drag City announced Murmurs & Whispers (1 September 2023 – pre-order here), the first proper album from P.G. Six since 2011’s Starry Mind. That announcement was accompanied by the lead single I Have Known Love which we chose as a Song of the Day.
Today marks the release of ‘I Have a House‘ – also a Song of the Day – which is accompanied by a beautiful animated video by Pat Gubler (aka P.G. Six) and Mayuko Fujino, a self-taught papercut and stencil artist from Tokyo currently based in the Hudson Valley, NY (she has also hosted radio shows on Wave Farm’s WGXC and WFMU).
Describing his abode with what must be high-traditional folk symbolism, P.G. taps into his quintessentially earthbound evocation of the celestial, employing a rolling drone, long-delay reverb, synthesizer, feedback and a massive electric guitar break to convey the darkly magisterial qualities of his sanctuary. Modern folk music at its most psychedelically progressive! RIYL: Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts, Meg Baird.
Pat’s been playing the harp for more years than he’s been in bands, but when he realized that he was writing a set of songs centred around harp compositions, he spent some time in the woodshed with his instrument, a late 80s model Triplett Celtic 34 String Harp (which replaced a lovely Paraguayan harp he’d played for years previously). After the previous P.G. albums of electric band arrangements, he was in a place of writing songs with more silence in them. He ended up playing a lot of the parts himself on Murmurs & Whispers, adding guitar, bass, keyboards, recorder and hurdy gurdy, in addition to his harp and vocals. Clark Griffin and Wednesday Knudson, who Pat plays with in Weeping Bong Band, played and sang a bit themselves, and the record was recorded piece by piece in houses around upstate New York by Mike Fellows.
Returning to the deep acoustic focus of the first couple of P.G. Six albums, Murmurs & Whispers is more straightforward in expressing its vision of rural celestial wonder. Bucolic and comfortably lived in, Murmurs & Whispers nonetheless projects the transcendent heart of P.G. Six once again, and as ever, it is magnificent to hear it passing through us.
Murmurs and Whispers is released on 1 September 2023 via Drag City.
Pre-Order here: https://lnk.to/murmursandwhispers