#finger-picking

This cassette release collects seven serene and unruffled meditations, mostly in finger picked acoustic guitar, but augmented sometimes with threads of bowed bass, lap steel and harmonica. Natural sounds, like a thunderstorm and bird noises, move in and out of these pieces, which are, themselves, natural and unpretentious. You can imagine the guitarist working them out in some sunny spot, perhaps picking up stakes and running inside when the weather turns and its starts to rain.

“Ca de Cavo” is especially lovely, its eddying cascades of finger picking shot through with bending, shifting tones of lap steel (that’s Mike Horn from Seawind of Battery sitting in). These compositions are not overly concerned with melody or song structure. They unspool in repeated patterns with few signposts indicating beginning, middle or end. They open out into a kind of wide-horizoned dreaminess, an infinity pool of sound that stretches as far as you can see.

Cedolin’s Instagram tells us that he’s been learning from Daniel Bachman, another skilled finger-picker whose compositions stretch to incorporate the living world. He is, at least so far, more tethered to the sound of his instrument; field recordings nest in the crevices of his songs, rather than taking them over. In “Lische Alte,” for instance, the rumble of wind slips between pensive guitar chords, the arc of lap steel (Horn again) tracing a throughline in the lyric jangle.

Ligurian Pastoral exists in its own time and space. It’s in no hurry to get to the end of its placid compositions, nor, after a while, is the listener. But it does take some adjustment, some slowing, some calming, some willingness to sit with this music, to get to its pleasures. Put it on with the sun streaming in and the whole afternoon idling in front of you. It will unfold like a flower.

The Rambles & Rags Of Shiloh was recorded at the same time as its predecessor, Branches & Leaves. But the two albums sound profoundly different from one another. The first release is an exactingly realized virtual ensemble performance, with prominent singing and a variety of instruments on every track. But Rambles… is a purely instrumental recording. Each piece is devoted to a particular instrument — a six or twelve-string guitar, or banjo — and sometimes to a particular method. Allred’s debt to James Blackshaw has never been clearer than on “The Dervish,” “Dance of the Fair Folk,” and “March of the True Bugs,” which all use tremolo string technique to generate slow-moving clouds of resonance-wrapped melody. The jaunty “Linville Rag,” which shares its name with a tiny burg in North Carolina, is a study in the joyous ends to which one can apply Piedmont-style picking. And the lap steel showcase, “Blues For Terry Turtle,” uses patient swoops up and down the neck to express posthumous regard for the fallen Buck Gooter guitarist. 

But to linger too long on methodology is to miss the way that the music’s diverse vectors converge to generate a sonic synergy of memory, imagination and emotion. Allred contains multitudes, but that’s what it takes to be a true standard-bearer of the Takoma School.

The North Carolina pair root their music in the mountains, but they build strange contexts around it, adding instruments like a shruti box and a bouzouki. Surprisingly, those textures don't add a world music influence so much as just darken the Appalachia. This is no Hollywood porch music; it's dark and leafy and cavernous. The buzz at the bottom of many of these tunes is the sound of the bottom about to drop out.  

At the same time, nothing on House and Land feels gimmicky. Morgan and Henson (visible in notable displays of picking skills) are careful composers here. They don't simply mash two influences together; no one's saying, “Ooh! How would Tony Conrad play this hymn?” There's a deep valuing of history across the album, of digging into the true roots that the artists have pursued. Understanding that value allows the two to expand what the songs can do, to build and reconstruct and pursue and new means for old truths.  

For all the historicizing and musicology that could squirm through conversation about this album, it's still the tunes and the central performances that carry the record. Morgan and Henson share vocal duties, usually in harmony. The a cappella “Johnny” lets the duo focus simply on melody and precise but engaged singing. When the next track, “Rich Old Jade” begins with a drone, it lets the vocalist's steady melody pull to the center of the performance. The hurt of that track is highlighted by the spareness of the performance. The emotional expression is Depression-era stoic, but the impact comes with force. Then everything feels like that inescapable buzz.  

House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn't stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. The group would be too restless for a retro celebration, yet it's their ability to pick through and understand the history that pushes them forward. That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.