Daniel Bachman’s 25-minute opus ‘Quaker Run Wildfire’ is one of his most potent and visceral responses to climate change to date.
In 2022, Virginia native Daniel Bachman released his remarkable Almanac Behind. The album marked a shift in perspective – ‘looking at the planet as a whole and the potentially disastrous results of climate change.’ As Glenn Kimpton wrote in his album review, Daniel used “a swirling blend of radio samples and earth and nature sounds, as well as acoustic instruments, often digitally manipulated, Daniel builds a dense but meticulous structure to illustrate the frustration, vulnerability and unpredictability surrounding his subject matter.”
This week, Australian label Longform Editions released Daniel’s 25-minute Quaker Run Wildfire (10/24/23 – 11/17/23) for Fiddle and Guitar. The field recordings used in its making were made close to his home during the Quaker Run Wildfire of October 2023. Following a month-long drought, an uncontained wildfire broke out close to his home, which took 25 days to extinguish and burnt upwards of 4000 acres. He recounts in the release notes:
“it was clear that the fire was not only uncontained, but was being fueled by a steady blanket of leaf litter from the many trees shedding their summer foliage. That night coyotes howled while emergency vehicles from nearby towns drove past our house, one after another, their sirens bouncing off the hillsides and distorting as they neared the fire. And for the first time, red embers, acres in size, visibly pocked the hillside.”
In terms of Bachman’s work around the ongoing climate breakdown of our planet, Quaker Run Wildfire (10/24/23 – 11/17/23) for Fiddle and Guitar is one of his most potent and visceral responses to climate change to date.
“I let the true series of events dictate the course of the track.”
Daniel Bachman begins with a beautiful wildlife field recording before a long lamenting fiddle drone begins to build. Close to the five-minute mark, we begin to hear sirens and the sound of military helicopters carrying water to attempt to extinguish the fire, growing in intensity. Bachman’s initial scene setting makes this transition both terrifying and heartbreaking. The devastation taking place throughout the recordings is intense. Around the 11-minute mark, the scene quietens, and Bachman’s spacious guitar notes become subject to glitchy interference that gives a sense of a broken world, with electronics building in intensity before being quelled.
In the notes for the release, Bachman reflects on area’s history and how English and German settlers violently claimed the land from the Monacan Indian Nation. He states:
A symptom of the unrelenting pursuit of forcing profits out of this land in utter disregard for both human and nonhuman life. Gone are the hemlock and chestnut groves who have been decimated by blight and disease. The sturgeon of the Chesapeake Bay of its tributary rivers. The big cats, and buffalo of Virginia’s highlands, and the pine savannahs that were reduced to heartwood and ships mast. And now, even our eternal mountaintops are cut in half for weak seams of bituminous coal and quartered into sections for disastrous fracked methane gas pipelines. How additional global heating at the cost of extractive industry will impact future climate breakdown in the region remains unknown. One thing however is certain… a new fire regime has arrived in the Middle Appalachians.
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Daniel Bachman: Website
Longform Editions: Bandcamp | Website