| FEAST VI | PHOTOS | PAST YEARS |
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Hana Stretton is a British/Australian composer, singer and producer known for her remarkably warm production style and uniquely spacious songform. In 2023, her debut album, Soon, earned a beloved status among discerning listeners around the globe. This stunning work caught the ear of one Phil Elverum, who lovingly reissued Soon through his own label in 2024, furthering the album’s reach and deepening its reputation. In the press, Elverum said: “I hear an artist who has entered completely into the stream where creation originates […] Hana Stretton has truly recorded the deep flourishing sound of a quiet listening mind in full blossom.” A fitting testament to a young artist rooted in the stillness of nature. From the dusty Australian bushland on Soon, Stretton transports the listener to the Pacific Ocean on her new album, tiarn (set to be released summer 2026). Shifting gradually like a shoreline, her new compositions reveal welcomed hints of classical and electronic flourishes. tiarn will be released independently with vinyl editions through PW Elverum & Sun (North America), brierfield flood press (Australia) and Lima Limo (Europe/UK).
Monocot is an improvising instrumental duo comprised of drummer Jayson Gerycz and guitarist Rosali Middleman. Jayson’s work I know mostly from the Cleveland rock band, Cloud Nothings, and cool sessions with Matthew J Rolin and Tony Pasquarosa. Rosali's records on Siltbreeze and Scissor Tail are great, but they seemed more focused on songs more than anything else. They both do have great guitar on them, but that didn’t seem like it was her main thing. Anyway, not having any idea what to expect, I was blown away by the music on Direction We Know. Jayson and Rosali met in Philadelphia in 2018 when she was playing with Purling Hiss. They ran into each other a few more times and talked about the idea of doing some studio jamming. A session finally happened in the Fall of 2019 when Jayson was again in Philly, and as far as I know this sole date is the full accounting of Monocot’s existence thus far. In this duo Rosali pulls out all the stops, and plays in a way she has only hinted at on earlier records. Flowing sheets of both psych and free-form rippery careen all over the place. Some parts remind me of Matt Valentine at his outer pinnacle, but the intensely lateral spread of Jayson’s percussion has a way of making the roar seem a lot more contained and sensical than it otherwise might. And although it doesn’t exactly sound like anything they’ve actually done, the tone here makes me remember bits I’ve heard by the Corsano/Chasny Duo that really pushed all my buttons. This Monocot session ran through the night and into the morning. When it was over neither of the musicians remembered just what it was they’d played. Which makes sense. Everything just happened without plans or rules to hem things in. Freedom can be a messy business, but when it’s good it’s truly liberating. And Direction We Know is real damn good.
Quinnisa Kinsella-Mulkerin recorded her first song at five years old with her parents, who comprise the adventurous Maine band, Big Blood. Ever since the age of five, she was writing songs, banging on chimes, strumming guitars, and clanging together whatever else she could find. Improvisation was natural, and she stuck to the approach. Quinn brings this innate sense of songwriting to The Wickies, a duo she formed with Aiden Arel a year ago at age 16, whose chill approach and fluid delivery belie true inventiveness in the underneath mechanics. Quinn’s lush, free-flowing lyrics, created on the spot, complement Aiden's fleshed out backing instrumentation and over-dubbing. Quickly, the pair created more material than they ever needed, allowing them to mold their recordings into a self-titled debut album. Like a painter crafting the perfect exhibition of their finest work, Aiden and Quinn condensed their improvisations to all the best parts. Tracks like “Campfire Song” and “Skipping Pond,” exemplify the ethereal and lackadaisical atmosphere of their sound. “I keep finding these weird, obscure bands from the seventies that have one album and nothing else, which is awesome,” Quinn said, “I want my music to sound like somebody found it in a record store that no one has ever heard of and uploaded it to YouTube. I want it to sound a little strange.”
Subminiature, the new live album by Philadelphia instrumental chamber folk ensemble Hour, comes fresh off the heels of 2024’s ‘Ease the Work’ and provides a capstone for the band’s oeuvre to date, brandishing new material alongside longstanding arrangements of pieces from 2018’s ‘Anemone Red’ and ‘Tiny Houses’, the inaugural releases of Dear Life Records. Across this collection of recordings harvested over two years of extensive DIY touring, bandleader/composer Michael Cormier-O’Leary demonstrates a deep understanding of the character of his shifting ensemble and its players. Subminiature also serves as a hard worn tour diary, cataloguing concerts that were affectionally curated to highlight the strength of the music; at once adventurous and melodic and insistent upon spaces that encourage deeper connection. These tours saw the group performing in movie theaters, on islands, in machine shops and parking garages, crowded bars and living rooms, churches and theaters. Invariably, the music expands and contracts to match the space the ensemble is performing in. Recorded on a range of recording devices, this impressive live album highlights the focus and dynamism of a hardworking, fluid ensemble.
Sustained glacial pitches and accidental harmonics give the conversation between the melodic and rhythmic elements a shifting world to inhabit that can go from reassuring comfort to dire uncertainty on a dime. There is pure anxiety in this music and there is glowing beauty in this music. It falls together small, grows quite large in the middle, and then dissolves into rhythmic fragments, patterns, and remnants until returning to the small of the beginning. It is The Snake that Swallowed the Elephant or The Hat, depending on how you look at it.
On revelations of divine love, jason calhoun’s fifth release for Dear Life Records, Calhoun has assembled an especially potent album of work that whirrs, hums, and glows. Unlike his recent output centered around extended, hypnotic compositions, the fourteen tracks here immediately request your attention and curiosity. Their concision only underscores one of his greatest strengths: the ability to capture an evaporating, fleeting moment, and hold it close. The title is a nod to British Anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose collected writing of the same title is the earliest of any woman written in English. Here it serves as a unifying theme for Calhoun's particular palette of restless textures and tentative melodies. This is personal music, to be sure, but it also feels tactile, almost taffy-like in its presentation—and with such a potent combination, it is hard to resist a smile while listening. Like when the insistent pulse grounding 'last one' suddenly changes color as yawning tones reveal themselves, or how 'eye dilation' tiptoes into the room with each note sounding like a carefully chosen step. Though never precious or fussy, the album remains resolutely intimate.
As I Walked Out was recorded over a weekend in June 2024 in Alli Rogers’ basement studio, Halloween on Raspberry Hill, straight to reel-to-reel with minimal overdubs. Rogers, the house engineer at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s, also mixed the record. The band was formed around a body of songs collected, written, and arranged by Evan Morgan (Magic Tuber Stringband, Weirs). Their sources are left intentionally vague by the sequencing of the record: original songs and tunes find themselves entangled with ballads and fiddle tunes of old (and not so old). Of course, there is nothing new about this concept: it is the same approach taken by the folk revivalists and rockers of the 60’s and 70’s. But it is rare to find such a collection of songs in the 2020’s, a time when “folk” has become synonymous with “acoustic singer-songwriter”. Dowsers comes out of the fertile central NC music scene. Members of the band are also members and collaborators of experimental folk groups Magic Tuber Stringband and Weirs, indie rock groups Fust and Sluice, and avant rock group Beak Trio. Chicago-based, Arkansas-born guitarist Austin Cash is the only out-of-towner; typically an open-tuned fingerstyle guitarist, Cash brings a delicate and painterly approach to the lead guitar lines that run across the record. The concept behind the group, a kind of slacker rock approach to the folk rock tradition of bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, acts as a foil to the “modern stringband” sound of Morgan and Werner’s work in Magic Tuber Stringband. Still, tracks like “Like A Winter’s Morning”, “The Greenbeds Are Empty”, and “Three Forks of Cheat” retain some of the dynamic interplay between fiddle and guitar emblematic of the Magic Tuber sound, but bolstered by bass and drums and pushed into new sonic dimensions with the introduction of electricity. While the folk rock inspiration for the record is obvious, the idiosyncratic styles of the players involved makes for a unique kind of rock band sound, as much Velvet Underground as Harvey Milk, as much Tony Conrad as Pavement.
Kneading dough is tricky – you should know how it’s supposed to feel. If you try too hard you could make it worse. It’s a beautiful practice – creation with a gentle touch, to work at something so it can be left alone. “If it’s too drawn out it’s awful. It’s easy to give too much.” Dance in the mirror. Contemplate your veiny hands. Who do they remind you of? You begin by mixing flour and water. “What happens when your people die? Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” Eliza Niemi asks two seemingly unrelated questions in a rising melody with guitar accompaniment, like fingers playing spider up to the nape of your neck. Gentle pressure. Strands of gluten form to bind the mix. A new question lingers in the binding. When she admits “but I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not,” that question surfaces through the text. It is reiterated throughout the album. When I’m working with dough I think the same thing to myself. On Progress Bakery, her second album as a solo artist, Eliza knows to leave some questions alone – to let juxtaposition and tension be the proof. It doesn’t have to be hard. The feelings and revelations they provoke rise in the heat. The smell is sweet. Crispy on the outside and soft all the way through. She playfully slip-slides through words and sounds and images, delighting in surprise, skimming ideas like stones cast across clear water, touching down briefly with uncommon grace.
Vernal Scuzz is a free-form band from Alabama, USA. Wild mixtures of improvisation, themes, songs and tape experiments played by Jasper Lee, Mika Carpenter, James Elliott, & Walker Yancey on bass, zithers, euphonium, electronics, tapes, drums & words. They pursue an evolving sound informed by cut-ups, noise, avant-folk, and punk. Members of the group have played in Silica Gel, Worst Spills, and collaborated with Johnny Coley, Joel Nelson, Sister Sniffle, Turner Williams Jr. and others. Vernal Scuzz emerge like a wet hot electric creature hissing in the night on their first release. Somewhere between proto-punk and primeval ceremony, the music is a highly charged rhythmic vehicle for navigating the murk of media litter. Crackles of noise meld with zither and brass tones....sounds that build an atmosphere and then burst suddenly into song. Jasper and Mika's voices coo and screech in equal doses. A recurring theme is the transmission of ideas through technological & linguistic means. Lyrics are made from cut-up sources like football game transcripts, tracts, lawnmower manuals, and somehow come out beautifully. Vernal Scuzz's first recording presents the group’s idiosyncratic concepts through a visceral playing style that is unpredictable and raw.
Peter Horses is a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and sometimes a band. Oddball folk music and goofball rock about full-time losers, the clinically unlucky, and shaking your fist at a clear, blue sky.
Glenn Jones is a unique player in the world of solo guitar music. Steeped in both American Primitive guitar music as well as rock and experimental music, Glenn Jones creates rich sonic tapestries with a distinct and stirring voice. Endlessly curious, Jones has spent the better part of four decades exploring the boundaries of expression and storytelling with the guitar and banjo. On Vade Mecum, Jones draws on his personal history to tell stories with elaborate musical detail and emotional weight. Exploring the complexity of personal experience, emotions and our shared histories, Vade Mecum finds Jones painting his music in boundaryless colors, captivatingly vivid.
Liam Grant (Boston, MA) is a New England guitarist with a punk ethos, cut from the American Primitive cloth. The restless guitar explorations, modal epics and driving uptempo rags recall the likes of Grant's pedagogue: Takoma Records and the path that was paved by his forebears John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Peter Walker, Max Ochs and later Glenn Jones, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Jack Rose, and others. Bridging that past Grant evokes the pith of the landscape where he was raised. Instrumental memoirs and ruminations on the banks of the Merrimack River. Amoskeag and the place where the waters flow around it. Salmon tails up the falls and black pearls from the river. The exodus to Stratton-Eustis and the last night on Dead River before the great flood.
Back in 2023, bassist Peter Kerlin (Sunwatchers, Chris Forsyth Solar Motel Band, Bent Arcana, Everloving) and drummer Rob Smith (Gray/Smith, Rhyton, Pigeons) ritualistically burnt their passports, ate the ashes, and began conspiring together under the guise of Animal, Surrender! Kerlin's spidery and melodious 8-string electric bass pushes the expected language of that instrument into terrain more often inhabited by lutes or pianos, and begs to interweave with a drummer like Smith who slyly punctuates, hisses, and propels against the grain. The duo's often wordless music is spun from threads of lost folksongs and polyrhythms into hypnotic, latticework compositions whose melodies and beats shift like cat's-cradles strung between their constantly moving hands. Their eponymous debut on Ernest Jennings Record Co. in 2024 found haunting covers of Nick Drake and Mike Wexler lurking amongst a tangle of lean, progressive originals, all crafted with the terse economy of post-rock, but reflecting a kaleidoscopic, pastoral vision in its eyes. Their forthcoming album, A Boot for Every Bane (2025 EJRC), builds upon the incantatory language of the first while inviting the talents and mercurial instincts of pipe organist Curt Sydnor (Greg Saunier, Yonatan Gat, Peni Candra Rini) into the magick circle. From within historic St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, where Poe's mother sleeps eternal and Patrick Henry once challenged the young nation to give him liberty or give him death, Sydnor breathes charged air from 120 year-old pipes to help the group coax troubled spirits from the American dirt for a spiritual reckoning. With new songs like Misswanderer and Ruinous Realm, Kerlin's mesmerizing bass-lines lure us further down the group's sonic left-hand path into thickets of compound rhythm and organ swells, where the trio also resurrects and rewilds two old familiar American standards: the seductive and sub-tropical Poinciana made famous by Ahmad Jamal's trio, and the untraceable, frontier river-song Shenandoah, known from deep renditions by Belafonte, Dylan, and Tony Rice to name but a few. Yet when an animal catches its own distorted reflection in the rolling river, what is left to do but surrender to the song?