If you look at the original psych-folk/acid folk boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a primarily British phenomenon. The Incredible String Band set the standard, Donovan pulled it closer to the mainstream, and a whole host of acts, ranging from acoustic pastoral dropouts like Vashti Bunyan to the sinister pagan prog of Comus, followed in the wake. It was a fertile but short heyday, and many of its most interesting acts – Mellow Candle, Jade, Trees, Mr. Fox – were largely forgotten until the early 2000s, when the burgeoning freak folk scene, headed up by Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and Espers, helped to renew interest in those formative documents. The result was a slew of reissues, re-formations, festival appearances and collaborations. The twist: most of the acid folk revivalists of the early 21st century were American.
We may currently be in the midst of a third wave of psychedelic folk music, but now it is a more disparate and nebulous entity, with arms on multiple continents. That being said, the American strain of the wyrd is still in fine fettle, and Blake Hornsby is one of its most gifted exponents. He is based in the thriving musical community of Asheville, NC, and previous albums – including 2023’s A Village of Many Springs – have seen him concoct varying combinations of free/experimental folk, drone-based compositions and acoustic guitar workouts that draw from the tradition of American primitivism. Brugmansia, by contrast, sees him lean heavily into British acid folk sound.
Brugmansia (named after the beautiful, poisonous flowering plant better known as angel’s trumpet) represents Hornsby as a pointedly anachronistic lysergic troubadour, styled perhaps on Donovan at his most outré. This (and you may have to listen to it closely and more than once to appreciate this) is a songwriter’s album, albeit a strange and beguiling one. Songs stretch out as if baking in the sun. The Child and the Crow seems designed to soundtrack some arcane outdoor ritual, the faux-naivety often associated with Donovan paired back and replaced with a real sense of wildness. Hornsby is known for utilising South Asian instruments and raga forms, and this is still the case: melodies seem to flutter in from the sky and land on the layers of drones and strings before taking to the air again. But it’s not just melodies: there are voices, perhaps incantations, and unidentifiable patterings.
The Singing Bells seems almost sinister until you lose yourself fully in it, and its monotonous spell becomes transcendent. While Lying in a Field of Datura Stramonium coalesces out of a heady mixture of rich, twanging strings and occult, technologically altered voices. It seems to exist somewhere between traditional song, avant-garde composition and ancient rite, and the interest and wonder comes from the porous nature of the boundaries separating those three things. That something so slippery works so well is testament not only to Hornsby, but to his cast of collaborators, which includes cellist and former Espers member Helena Espvall, tabla player Mallar Goswami and guitarist Buck Curran.
A Song for Our Eyes to Hear, with its wide-eyed Banhart-esque lyrics and simple acoustic fingerpicking, veers close to the twee, but the added complexity of the swooning, gasping string parts keeps things fresh and continuously exciting. Rishikesh, with its enchanting, descending melody that unfolds and sways over eight-plus minutes, is the most recognisably song-like thing on the album. The influence of the Incredible String Band, which can be felt all over Brugmansia, is at its strongest here, with Hornsby fusing eastern instrumentation with structures derived from progressive western music: never have cello and tabla sounded so closely enmeshed.
Traces of Hornsby’s experimental nature remain strong, and are strongest in the wild field recordings of opener Solananceae (where the merest hint of an eldritch melody impinges on the sounds of birds and insects), in the manipulated voices and weird stereo effects of the title track, and in closer Eaecanalos, which seems literally to breathe, to pulsate with recorded life. It hammers home the important point that Brugmansia is a living album, not just a relic of a bygone musical era or a cynical exercise in revivalism. The latest pulse of freak folk is strong, and is defined by a real sense of musical ingenuity. There is a whole cohort of artists finding new ways of making it weird (and using that weirdness as a way of exploring landscapes and traditions), and with Brugmansia, Blake Hornsby has positioned himself at the forefront of that generation.
Brugmansia (July 7th, 2026) Monadnock Sound & Vision
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