"They dissolve a mass of fiddles, cellos, acoustic guitars, banjos, harmoniums, organs, and mutating shape note singing in a warm, radiant, brainwave-spiked singularity. "I Want to Die Easy," based on the revered Smithsonian Folkways recording that Sam Amidon's parents sang on, eases us into the continuum from traditional to turbulent: Conventional close harmonies, bathed in the silo's long reverb, open out into lush gospel stacks and start poking into tart modernist corners."
""Everlasting" transforms a hymn into a locust swarm of electroacoustic psychedelia, while the MIDI-juiced "Doxology (I)," based on a Sacred Harp hymn, is a pitch-shifted tiny anthem in the line of Macha's "Believe" cover, so sweet you wish there were more than 72 seconds of it. And there are two tour-de-force deconstructions of English ballads, "Lord Randall" and "Lord Bateman," the latter heroically convolving for 20 prismatic minutes."
An ensemble featuring Mipso's Libby Rodenbough and Magic Tuber Stringband reimagines Appalachian and English folk through dense, deconstructed soundscapes. Acoustic instruments and mutating shape-note singing are merged into a warm, radiant, brainwave-spiked singularity that stretches traditional close harmonies into lush gospel stacks and modernist textures. Hymns are transformed into electroacoustic psychedelia and pitch-shifted mini-anthems, while extended deconstructions of ballads unfold into prismatic, metallic, and quantized sonic environments. The work emphasizes immersive sound, slow unfolding moments, and a felt continuity between coherent past forms and a scrambled, deracinated present.
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