Nick Jonah Davis will release Rose Delta Rising on 4th September via Eiderdown Records (US) and Cardinal Fuzz Records (UK). It is his first full-length since 2020’s When the Sun Came and his second release for Eiderdown, following the 2021 cassette release Dérive Néolithique.
Davis is best known for working solo; Guitar, lap steel, the odd field recording. Rose Delta Rising is a band record. Arts Council England funded the sessions, which brought in drummer Joe Danks, bassist Neal Heppleston and composer Richard “Biff” Birkin on string arrangements. Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Burd Ellen) contributed overdubs — KLOF readers will know her from the MMM trio with Davis and Elizabeth Still, whose Lunistice Alignments Glenn Kimpton reviewed here in June.
They recorded at Black Bay Studio in the Outer Hebrides and Pete Fletcher produced. Fletcher goes back a long way with Davis — he mixed House of Dragons at the same studio in 2015. David Hand did the artwork for that album too and returns here.
While a few of these pieces are older: Whistle On Woolf appeared on When the Sun Came and Poa Kichizi on the 2016 Split Electric with C. Joynes, they are given the full band treatment now. To See A Manalishi grew out of Peter Green’s The Green Manalishi and one track started with a homemade third bridge — fretwire fixed to a twig.
The title comes from something Davis saw as a kid. His father used to fly enormous delta kites on oversized fishing reels, sending them impossibly high. One day the pink kite crashed into a tree and disappeared. His father searched the branches. Nick was looking across a nearby lake. The kite rose silently from beneath the surface of the water. That kind of moment — brief, unexplained, gone before you can frame it. Davis’s father died in 2020 and never heard these recordings. Hand recreated the kite for the cover, and they flew it on Stanton Moor, near the Nine Ladies stone circle.
“You have to leave it sometimes, wait for the wind to pick up,” Davis says of the album’s long gestation.
Glenn Kimpton’s KLOF review of When the Sun Came described it as “surprising, patient, spacious and quite mesmerising.” Rose Delta Rising sounds like that same patience paying off.
Bandcamp: Eiderdown Records (US) | Cardinal Fuzz (UK)