North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband make part-improvised music that inhabits a sweet spot at the centre of a triangle formed by American primitivism, Appalachian mountain music and freak folk. Until recently, they performed as a duo (Courtney Werner on fiddle and field recordings, Evan Morgan on guitar and organ), but for Heavy Water, they are joined by a third full-time member, Mike DeVito (of Weirs), who plays bass, fiddle, and banjo. They were formed in 2019, and since then have released prolifically – more than one record a year for seven years – but Heavy Water is their first since 2024’s Needlefall. And like Needlefall, it’s being released on Thrill Jockey. But life on a comparatively well-known indie label hasn’t blunted the band’s experimental instincts. On the contrary, they seem even more intent to create a music that combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour.
Heavy Water is inspired by Werner’s work as an ecologist on the Savannah River, a site heavily contaminated by a nuclear plant built by the US military in 1952. The twin ideas of contamination and displacement (the town of Ellenton was completely uprooted when the plant was built) underpin much of the material on the album, meaning that a thematic thread links one piece to the next. That’s not to say that Heavy Water is in any way formally constrained. The concept is, if anything, liberating. It provides a loose framework which the band use to explore complex ideas: historical and contemporary anger, the grief felt at the loss of a home, the joy and camaraderie of protest, the quieter joy of immersion in a beloved landscape.
Opening track The Death of Ellenton sees the group collaborating with Oliver Child-Lanning (Weirs), who provides a tape loop of the Johnson Family Singers version of the song from 1951. The repetition and decay hints at the uncanniness of an environment suddenly vacated by its human population; the voices, hidden in the depths of discordance, have a beyond-the-grave quality. It is immediately offset by a moment of clarity and melancholic beauty: the plucked strings and flighty fiddle of Marker of a Drowning make for a dreamy, old-timey take on American primitivism. A similar feeling of lightness characterises Evan’s composition Where the Place Becomes Forgetting, which is augmented by Werner’s watery and avian field recordings.
Recordings made in the locality account for much of Heavy Water’s unique atmosphere, but there is also a field recording from Birmingham, Alabama, that provides one of the most powerful moments. Sound of a Million Stars features a contribution from sound artist Jasper Lee: the sound of railroad operation and maintenance creeps into the track’s improvisational clatter. Three minutes of intensity and apparent confusion – inspired by the Japanese artist Tomonari Nishikawa’s work with camera film degraded by radiation – it seems to reach for a kind of clarity or resolution without ever quite getting there. Clarity of a sort arrives in the following track, Woodpeckers, which foregrounds a sample of songbirds and woodpeckers taken by Werner alongside a radioactive waste canal. But even here, the stillness is ambiguous: the woodpeckers’ drumming is apparently a defensive response to the sound of machine gun fire from a nearby military training facility. Wordlessly, this short piece speaks volumes about the way humans interact with the natural world, and about the natural world’s own instinctive capacity for resistance.
Blooms In the Rapids is a more traditionally folk-oriented instrumental, inspired by Argentine guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui and with echoes of contemporary practitioners like Sarah Louise. Towards its conclusion, it morphs into a fiddle freakout, the plucked guitar continuing serenely under the warped, freeform bowing. The sudden tension is palpable and powerful. Equally powerful but ostensibly more sedate is Tribute to the Angels, where the fiddle twitches and pulls at the edges of melody, testing its limits and expanding them. Wintering Grounds is even more playful, the fiddle seeming to take flight and land in unexpected places, while plucked strings urge the tune on with percussive intent, until halfway through it settles into an irresistible swaying, dancing melody.
Elsewhere, Ellenton’s troubled history makes itself known in different ways. The composition of Scintillation was inspired by the way in which scintillation detectors generate photons in response to radiation. Closer Dog-Headed Man, a fiddle tune by DeVito, wears its strangeness under a veil of sweet, swooning melody, but its title (inspired by St Christopher, who was often depicted as a cynocephalic giant) hints at the uncertainty of nature and its disregard for the binary.
Heavy Water is an album so thoroughly engaged with history and place that it’s sometimes hard to say where those things end and the music begins. That’s not a bad thing: it implies a level of social and intellectual engagement which is not often found, particularly in Appalachian music, which is frequently subject to twee revisionism. The fact that Magic Tuber Stringband provide a potent antidote to that revisionism – and the fact that they do so while creating skillful, satisfying and complex compositions – should be applauded.
Heavy Water (May 22nd, 2026) Thrill Jockey
Bandcamp: https://magictuberstringband.bandcamp.com/album/heavy-water