“Conjure[s] soundscapes able to summon the spirit of the natural world and rekindle its latent magic.” So we wrote of Kin, the new album from interdisciplinary artist and self described “practitioner of earth-reverent skills and philosophies” Fletcher Tucker, forthcoming from Gnome Life Records. The record centres on Fletcher’s understanding of “relationality,” using songs to map and deepen his “relationships to place, ancestors, ceremonial practice, and kinfolk (human and more-than-human).” Single ‘To Light a Fire’ introduced the style, a song “following the lineage of Hildegard von Bingen and inspired by the experience of a white-out blizzard in the Northern Sierra mountains,” as we continued. “The one and only Phil Elverum adds percussion to a song which embodies the stratified layers of time and place which constitute the record.”
With the release of Kin imminent, Fletcher Tucker has returned with new single ‘Great Flowering Mind’ to further introduce the mission behind the album. Tucker describes the track as “a song of kinship with the more-than-human—boulders, rivers and trees, spirits of place and long-dead ancestors,” and the result is as grand and sweeping as such subject matter deserves. A song slow but never still, as though attuned to a different scale of time, or rather several simultaneously. That is, a song able to evoke an almost geological expansiveness without sacrificing any level of detail—bleached bones, unfurling smoke, mountain lion scat, mossy stones—and thus one able to hold every facet of a landscape with equal devotion and curiosity. An achievement which not only transports the listener but shifts them towards the frame of mind the record is championing. As Tucker continues:
[‘Great Flowering Mind’] is a song which describes and embodies the practice of kin-making (kinning). It is the heart-center and thesis statement of Kin. It is my personal story of uncovering belonging, and endeavoring to re-enchant my chosen homeplace (Big Sur)—establishing totemic nodes of relationality, cultivating awareness, reciprocity, and communion. This is, simply put, the great spiritual undertaking of my life: becoming kin.
Watch the video shot by Fletcher Tucker on Esselen Tribal land, currently known as Big Sur, California, below:
Kin will be released on the 15th August via Gnome Life Records and you can pre-order it now from the Fletcher Tucker Bandcamp page.
