Needlefall, the new album from North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband, thrives on the philosophy of care: ethical care for a musical heritage, intellectual care for an avant-garde spirit, and deeper-rooted familial care for place and people. It’s an intense musical experience and exceptionally rewarding.
It seems obvious to say that a lot of folk music is directly inspired by landscape; after all, much of it has its origins in season cycles and agriculture and labour – immutable subjects of traditional song. But often, this link is talked about conservatively in terms of history and preservation. With the Magic Tuber Stringband, the connection is more keenly felt because this is music that both stems from an active folk tradition but also engages with landscapes as they are today. Those landscapes are both topological and artistic, and of course, topology and art have always been bound up together, even if sometimes uneasily.
In theory, this approach produces a strain of ecological folk music that shares much with the impressive American mysticism of guitarist Sarah Louise and the soi-disant primitivism of her forebears but also reaches back into twentieth-century experimental composition (the band cite Pauline Oliveros as an influence), striving perhaps to create a music that thrives on the philosophy of care: ethical care for a musical heritage, intellectual care for an avant-garde spirit, and a deeper-rooted familial care for place and people. In practice, it’s a mixture that proves more interesting and harder to pin down than these influences might suggest, not least because of the complexity and diversity of the group’s Appalachian roots.
So where we might expect, for example, to find clangour and drone, we get an opening track (A Dance On A Sunday Night) that is brisk and light and melodic, though not without its sense of unease. There is a sense of ecstatic fluidity, a recognition that dance is a state of visceral abandon but also a highly potent symbol of flux and progress and carnality. The high-strung melody is constantly aware of its own precariousness: it always feels like it is about to tip over into something inexplicable. A dance is always a risk.
Magic Tuber Stringband’s two core members are Courtney Werner and Evan Morgan. They play – primarily but not exclusively – fiddle and guitar, have been active as a duo since 2019, and are based in North Carolina. Needlefall is a continuation of a prolific few years’ work, and is perhaps their most accomplished and cohesive record to date. They strike a balance between the flightier, more melodic moments (the aforementioned A Dance On A Sunday Night) and more introspective, meditative pieces, on which the influence of experimental music and that of the long processes of nature can be more keenly felt. Days Of Longing falls somewhere between the two: a sinuous, river-like fiddle tune weaving between insistent strums before descending into warped and chaotic improvisation.
Closer to the experimental end of the spectrum are The Hermit’s Passage and Water Dripped Upwards, two pieces linked by a shared field recording. The former builds from scratchy minimalism into a spooked melange of plucked and bowed strings, while the latter uses the natural background drone as a space to build an increasingly complex lacework of fingerpicking. The Long Suffering unfolds like a drama, the plot thickened by the presence of sax and clarinet player Crowmeat Bob, and the title track somehow splices minimal composition to danceable folk music: perhaps it shouldn’t work, but it does, and brilliantly.
Sometimes, a piece will evolve in parts, like Twelfth House, which clanks to life, skips around jauntily for a while, then folds in on itself, becoming introspective and playful again by turns. This inherent gift for timing and progression can make a four-minute tune sound like a miniature folk opera. At points, melodies drawn from existing tradition will merge with passages of improvisation, and for a spell, you can almost experience the growth and change of folk music in real-time. It’s an exhilarating experience. Equally thrilling is the haunting musical saw that runs through the closing piece, Piney Woods Burn. Droney atmospherics mingle with strings and reeds as the album comes to a conclusion that is almost multisensory in its keen evocation of place and mood. It all adds up to an intense musical experience, one that is not without its surprises but which, nevertheless, is exceptionally rewarding.
Pre-order Magic Tuber Stringband’s Needlefall: https://thrilljockey.com/products/needlefall