Magic Tuber Stringband
North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.
Magic Tuber Stringband share “Where the Place Becomes Forgetting,” a gorgeous single from their upcoming album “Heavy Water”. Featuring field recordings from a pond on the edge of a nuclear site in Northern Georgia, the track layers steady banjo and guitar riffing with fraught fiddle swoops — watch the intimate live performance video now.
Magic Tuber Stringband have announced Heavy Water, out May 22nd — their most expansive album yet, rooted in the ecological and human fallout of nuclear arms production in rural South Carolina. Lead single Tribute to the Angels draws on Hilda Doolittle’s wartime poetry and old-time fiddle tradition, its luminous harmonics hovering between folk memory and grief. Spring tour dates are forthcoming.
Weirs’ new album, Diamond Grove, captures a moment in time by embracing the unique sonic imperfections of its recording site. The lead single, “I Want to Die Easy,” features vocals recorded with the natural two-second reverb of a farm silo, creating a hauntingly timeless sound that merges traditional hymns with contemporary experimentalism.