We first wrote about Lindsay Skedgell’s Mother Juniper back in 2020 with ‘Carolina‘, a single which captured the distinctively blurred border between the natural and spiritual forces which inform the project. “Songs at once organic and ethereal,” as we put it, “rooted in the natural but not constrained by it, delving beyond the mere material world into something deeper and more mysterious.” Follow-up single ‘Black Locust‘ was similarly inclined, A track we described as “cryptic and intuitive, a contemplation of the value and beauty of what we cannot know,” which homed in on the intention of the Mother Juniper project:
If there are things beyond our understanding, deeper than our surface experience of the world, then Skedgell brings them into relief, skirting around their edges so that something of their shape might become apparent.
Following on from Parlor Songs, a joint release with Doctor Delia, Mother Juniper is back with a brand new EP, Someone out of Sorts Follows the Web. Serving as something of a prelude to a forthcoming debut full-length set for release via Spirit House Records next year, the album was recorded on a 4-track in the woods, a process which further centres the intimate and organic nature of the Mother Juniper style. Something apparent from opener ‘Destroyer’, a track full of small textures and tactile moods which sits within a lineage of such lo-fi recordings, from Connie Converse to Michael Hurley and beyond.
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‘The Bug Song’ continues along this track, spinning out a web of images and vignettes in a manner worthy of its namesakes, a simple process used to weave such intricate patterns. The result is a thread dreamlike in its logic, the listener taken from scene to scene with no cuts or interruptions, reinforcing Mother Juniper’s habit of aligning natural and dreamlike states.
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Closer ‘What Would It Be Like’ is no less striking, a patient, understated croon with a toe-tapping rhythm just below the surface, though one which is morphed by idiosyncratic rises and falls, Skedgell posing questions with both pressing immediacy and rhetorical drift. The pattern captures Someone out of Sorts Follows the Web in a wider sense One guided by forces perhaps not immediately apparent, be they subtle weather conditions, extrasensory phenomena, strange eddies in mood and thought. Forces which might not seem willing or able to govern our movements, yet do so nonetheless.
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Someone out of Sorts Follows the Web is out now and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.