North Carolina-based multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan’s fourth solo album, Second Circle the Horizon, sees her further embrace the more improvisational style of performance she first explored on her excellent 2021 Cups album and move away from some of the more indie-folk stylings that peppered her debut, 2020’s Thread.
Like Cups, Second Circle the Horizon is a purely instrumental album, but unlike that completely solo, solitary recording (a sign of the times, perhaps), we have guest musicians on a few tracks here, with Sean Dunlap providing subtle synthesizers, Brian Weitz of Animal Collective playing hurdy-gurdy and album mixer Joseph Dejarnette thrumming ghostly bass notes on Old-time fiddle tune Callahan. So, perhaps it is more of a follow-up to 2023’s Carrying, which celebrated Sally Anne’s first pregnancy and birth (Second Circle is partly inspired by her second pregnancy).
However, the overriding theme across all nine of these songs is nature and the natural world, and Sally Anne seems keen to capture that beautiful, rustic simplicity in the music here. It is there in all of its purity on the opening song, Flowers of Shandihar, which uses a jolly banjo refrain throughout the whole piece to hang looser fiddle lines on. The mood here is light, and the music feels like a nod to the simple beauty surrounding us.
The organic feel that Sally Anne explored so successfully on Cups also accompanies us here, with slightly strange, cascading background sounds on Eye is the First, which shifts the structure of a simple, spare, and improvised-sounding guitar and banjo piece. Also effective is what sounds like a güiro, bringing a moist, foliar character to the slow fiddle of Calico Summoning, lending the whole song a more playful, exploratory feel.
Perhaps more familiar sounding is I Saw a Heron, which begins like a traditional Irish air, with a beautiful, ethereal-sounding fiddle line that is soon partially smothered by lower, bowed drone notes, adding a different, darker shade to the piece that the stark piano notes accentuate. A sense of sadness and inevitability pervades the music here, lending it an elegiac quality. Still, the effectiveness of the music, particularly two repeated piano notes, is stunning.
I’m a big fan of anything Sally Anne Morgan releases, but I was particularly taken with the weirder, looser-sounding Cups. Second Circle the Horizon continues in that vein while leaning gently on some of the slightly broader-sounding arrangements on her other albums. The result is spot on: a quiet, sometimes enigmatic celebration of the purity of nature and life through the lens of versatile music inspired by the Appalachian tradition. It’s her most cohesive and accomplished album to date.
Second Circle The Horizon (June 20th, 2025) Thrill Jockey
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