Fletcher Tucker creates a kind of cosmic ambient Americana, or at least that’s the short version of events. In reality, his work is more complex and subtle than those genre definitions suggest. Firstly, the America he inhabits is older and weirder than the European culture that planted the seeds of folk music on the continent. Perhaps it is older even than any human life on the landmass. His music has ties to the landscape, to a wider and more universal concept of landscape, in fact. Its human element speaks the language of ritual, that most ancient of tongues, with which we first learned to converse with the seasons and the weather and the animals, dangerous and placid. While it moves towards repetition and the hint of hypnosis, it is, in reality, an earthy rather than a cosmic music. And it is more active than our current ideas of ambience would usually permit: it roves over rocks like a clear stream, or scales trees like a moss.
Tucker’s global influences can be felt most clearly on his 2021 album Unlit Trail, which was conceived and recorded while on tour in Sweden. For Kin, he is back in the USA, but the Swedish influences remain in the form of a deep, quasi-religious connection with the outside world and – more tangibly – in his choice of instruments, which includes Swedish bagpipes and zither. Here, as on Unlit Path’s 2017 predecessor Cold Spring, he reflects on the rural wilderness of Big Sur and the ancestral knowledge that remains latent in that wilderness. Kin explicitly draws on the link between place, individual and community. Musically, Tucker is concerned with the primacy of breath and the mouth, so it seems fitting that the opening track A Candle rises and falls in a structure that seems to mimic respiration. Even the instruments – the various woodwinds in particular – seem to be conscious of the fact that they exist as exhalations. The lyrics pour forth in a kind of murmured chant, mysterious without being vague.
The influence of Eastern religious practice can be heard on Born Back Into the Earth, with its chimes and singing bowls, but there is a sense of the uncanny too, with an insistent scratching sound that provides a strange, uneven rhythmic element. The longest tracks, like Great Flowering Mind, proceed on meditative drones punctuated by descriptive lyrical passages. Conversely, the brief, percussive Only Dancing, is like a fluttering heartbeat returning to a state of calm.
Field recordings are another common feature. Pregnant Emptiness builds from the night-sounds of insects into a gentle drone whose sound always seems just beyond grasp. Elsewhere, leaves are rustled and oak branches shaken. The Breathing Night – the piece that engages most directly with ideas of meditation and respiration – plays lambent woodwinds off against barely-there background sounds.
The lengthy closing track, To Light a Fire, conjures a cold and windswept landscape and proceeds to warm it with drapes of synth and soothing chanting. Truncated melodic flickers creep in halfway through, followed by a cascade of drums owing more to free jazz than to folk. The characteristic chanting serves multiple purposes here: it creates a sense of tension, but also an atmosphere of belonging.
And it is that strange, half-melodic chanting that gives Kin its unique flavour. Previous Fletcher Tucker albums had more obvious influences or antecedents: Unlit Trail, for example, had moments that sounded superficially similar to early P.G. Six or Six Organs of Admittance, or even Little Wings (whose 2011 album Made it Rain was released on Tucker’s Gnome Life label). If Kin has any link to the outside world, it comes in the form of Tucker’s collaborators: Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Mariam Wallentin (Fire! Orchestra, Mariam the Believer), Chuck Johnson, Sean Smith (LFZ), and Spencer Owen. But Kin genuinely sounds like nothing else, an album full of ritualistic sonic patterns and precisely detailed shifts in tone and mood, an album rooted less in a single landscape than in the very idea of landscape, and all the ancientness and weirdness that implies.
Kin (August 15th, 2025) Gnome Life Records