How do you like your Free Folk? Plaintive yodelling over earnestly plucked strings? Freaky throat singing over microtonal mayhem? Cloudbursts of flugelhorn, clarinet and percussion like sonic prayers parachuting from heaven? Well, Kindling – the new album by Mikey Powers’ The Powers Ensemble – contains all these things and more.
There’s a freshness to Kindling which is disarming but also makes your blood sing with recognition. Let me give you an example. When I first started listening to Will Oldham’s music, it bridged a lot of disparate passions. I loved folk music, ecstatic improvisation and misanthropic literature with an Old Testament tinge. He seemed to glue all these things together with a charisma that was unguessable. Why did he make these decisions which made the songs awkward to like, but eventually became the bits that you fell in love with? – the crack in the voice, the misheard lyric, the climactic cymbal hit two seconds after the final guitar chord – all to the cadence of a deconstructed sea shanty. Eventually I heard other things that offered similar plot points of the heart – Astral Weeks, Jackie O’ Motherfucker, Robbie Basho. The Powers Ensemble share the mutant DNA of all these psychic travellers.
Opening track Arachnified gathers slowly with spuming brass, skittering percussion and Libby Rodenbough’s languid violin until Powers’ voice hypnotises them into a groove, singing about “Skipping over glass until it shatters then splashes”. It establishes a dilated and devotional tone which echoes through the album’s nine tracks. Stackhouse has a similar introduction, with all the instruments vibrating in mid-air until Powers pulls everything into focus with a keening vocal uplifted by Clay White’s horizontal brass lines and Charlie Boss‘s droning double bass.
Each song captures a communal rush of discovery – like you’re learning the topography of the song at the same time as the band. None more so than on the gorgeously meandering Gaslight, with its huge gulps of space, open tunings and impressionistic lyrics about “staring at the water from the edge of the shore”. The Great Acceptance is a cartwheeling jig of mandolin and violin and the shortest track on the album at 34 seconds. This acts as a piquant sorbet before the final track – The Valley – which is a traditional Irish tune and a kissing-cousin of the cowboy song ‘The Streets of Laredo’. It’s an “As I went out walking…” story of a brave soldier returning from the white heat of war and dying in the arms of his comrade. At times the delivery is a little histrionic amid the bloom of shruti box, bass clarinet and Dave Portner’s (Avey Tare) rattling percussion, but it’s also undeniably moving and captures the Ur-drone which is the implicit heart of all traditional song.
In my early 20’s I used to play Topic LPs on the stereo in one room and Albert Ayler in another to try to reconcile those musics into one hydra-headed organism. Mikey Powers and his band of merry pranksters have achieved this same soundworld in all its messy ecstasy with flair and concision. Respect.
Kindling (June 26th, 2026) Shiny Boy Press