Joined by Matt Schlatter (bass, lead guitar, synth), Andrew Tivon Orenstein (drums) and Jon-Delia Freeman (violin), Skedgell brings this mood to life with the eye of a storyteller and a traditional folk style. Music as folk horror or fairytale, albeit grounded in a human experience. Each track a glimpse into the esoteric space between myth and reality, where auguries line up to signal our coming fates, and strange images resonate with deeper truths.

Opener ‘Carolina’ is a track we’ve described previously as “loaded with oneiric strangeness, the sense of uncanny discovery particular to dreams.” Here sleep comes as a blank slate, a space beyond the binding categories of reality where new stories can be crafted, both histories and futures escaped. “I often lost my name in my sleep,” Skedgell sings, and later ‘name’ is switched out to ‘needs’, the sound somewhere between ominous and alluring, as though to commit to such a habit carries both promise and unease. For the rest of the track speaks of lost loved ones, of a world on fire, an empire half-mad with its own desires. Where else might relief be found but sleep?

But the foreboding is counterbalanced by a tenderness too. Take tracks like ‘The Sculptor’ or ‘The Amphitheatre’, which possess real warmth, even while haunted by the dead. ‘Black Locust’ is similarly fond in its tone, a love letter to a garden tree “at once cryptic and intuitive,” as we wrote in a previous review. “A contemplation of the value and beauty of what we cannot know.” As we noted then, the song serves a stellar example of the manner in which Mother Juniper broaches mystery with such a curious and instinctive eye. “If there are things beyond our understanding,” we continued, “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.”

The idea comes back to the image of small animals and the ominous sky, something Mother Juniper return to with ‘I Dreamt of a Snake’. “In this dream I was the snake / Said can you help me out?” Skedgell says, voice hushed and spoken. “All secret creatures are in danger / Of being found out.” The fear in ‘These Little Animals’ was leavened by the sublime potential of the ominous sky, as though fear of a certain size becomes its own transcendence. But here the tone is altogether more modest. Vulnerability as it is lived. And what results is the very thing which elevates Mother Juniper above much of the esoteric folk canon. For just as Skedgell is willing to walk out into the mystical, it is never done without human grounding. As highlighted by closer ‘Apology of Hades’, where even the god of the dead himself is wracked by remorse and regret.

Winter comes too early
Too early for me
I should’ve let you go
Not taken you from sleep

Write The Soil Lighter is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.

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Next month, the second volume in the series will be released, Sprigs & Sprays, Vol. II: A Benefit Compilation for Environmental Justice. This time, all proceeds will go to The Indigenous Environmental Network, an incredible organization which describes itself as “an alliance of grassroots indigenous peoples whose mission is to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from contamination and exploitation by strengthening maintaining and respecting the traditional teachings and the natural laws.”

The compilation will feature sixteen artists in total, including some we are already familiar with (such as Vireo, Bea Troxel and Strawberry Runners) and some who are completely new to us. Only three are available to listen to so far, but offer more than enough to suggest that every entry will be a small gem in its own right. Such as ‘Eternity’ by Brooklyn’s Nadoyel, a slice of mournful slo-mo dream pop that crests in swathes of emotive strings and whale song-like wails.

The project of Louisville, Kentucky’s Daniel Lobb, So It Was shares an overtly political track that somehow manages to embody a much needed oasis of calm in the current climate of greed and bigotry. “You are welcome in this world,” Lobb sings in a gentle yet steadfast rebuttal to prejudice and injustice, “no matter your points in the game.”

Lastly is ‘Fisher Cat’ by Lindsay Skedgell’s Mother Juniper, a project we have grown to love over the last couple of years. As we described previously, Mother Juniper make music “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,” combining earthy folk with dreamlike ambience to evoke both the natural world and some other plane beyond our limited senses. This song is no different, rich with a sense of place and rooted in ecosystems that continue to cradle us even us we dig them up, chop them down, cover them in steel and glass and concrete.

Sprigs & Sprays, Vol. II releases on 7th April. Pre-order it now from the Whatever’s Clever Records Bandcamp page. There is also an option to buy a limited edition postcard (see example below) by Benedict Kupstas of Field Guides.

Cover art by Tyler Rai and Benedict Kupstas

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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.

‘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.

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.

Someone out of Sorts Follows the Web is out now and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.

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For their latest release, Parlor Songs, Mother Juniper teamed up with Doctor Delia, an artist based in Portland, Oregon who describes themselves as “an entity specializing in tinctures, alchemical transubstantiation, and old-time new-time music.” From that description alone it is plain to see Mother Juniper and Doctor Delia make the perfect creative partners. Together they crafted something subtly beautiful, a collection of lovingly home-recorded and truly collaborative songs which feel not quite of our time.

Indeed, as the title suggests, Parlor Songs is a throwback to another era, one before the wide availability of recorded music, where people had to sing and play to entertain each other. Recorded in a single day in “an old room with a red piano […] with one microphone in a boot, and one bottle,” the album possesses an intangible sense of homespun communal spirit. Its songs build from uncertain intros, often accentuated with whispered questions or comments between artists, into rhythms and flows which feel like something passing through the room.

Clocking in at just over 90 seconds, opener ‘Orange Tree’ is a wonderfully simple and sincere folk song. “Down by the orange tree” it begins “where the juice drips drips drips drips / I found a swarm of bees.” But it also displays the record’s stranger side too, a surreal sleep logic that melds reality and fantasy, imagined scenes becoming indistinguishable from the physical. The bees go on to live in the narrator’s head, take a trip to the south without ever stepping from beneath the orange tree.

Left town on a Saturday
drove down to New Orleans
and it seems we’ve been inside a dream
where the scenes skip skip skip skip skip

The rest of the album continues along a similar path, bringing together songs pre-written and songs made up on the day, simply crafted but enveloped in a veil of mystery. Some tracks, like ‘Bathtub Song’ are wordless and feel improvised, plucked from the ether in that quiet room, while others contain more distinctive storytelling. “There are things you’ll never know” goes ‘Steam Risin’ as it shuffles and shambles in tuneful disorder, feeling like something of a mission statement for the project, while ‘Old Morass’ slows things down with ponderous and poignant piano.

Ultimately, Parlor Songs is an aural document of one place on one afternoon, a moment suspended in time forever. It captures the sound of the rain, of people beyond the old wooden windows, and the small magic conjured by Mother Juniper and Doctor Delia within. As the album’s blurb puts it:

Neither of them knows what will happen, but they begin on one Spring afternoon…It was a day on the precipice of the plague’s pause, which made the radio earthquake and the city swell. Right in that great edge of possibility we sometimes refer to as the unknown, they started singing.

Parlor Songs is out now and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.

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Mother Juniper is back with a brand new single, ‘Black Locust’, and the mystical atmosphere continues. Described as “a love letter to the black locust tree in my old backyard and the secrets she keeps,” the song is at once cryptic and intuitive, a contemplation of the value and beauty of what we cannot know. 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.

The black locust tree
stands outside my home
what she said to me
will always go unknown

go unknown

Cover art by Rochelle Voyles

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Take new single, ‘Carolina’, a track of stark banjo and pressing background tones, the vocals compelled along like some daydream message, some hymn or incantation. “‘Carolina’ came about while exploring connection’s winding dance,” they explain. “It was born in observing the absence and presence of my father, then the absence and presence of lovers.” The result is a song loaded with oneiric strangeness, the sense of uncanny discovery particular to dreams.

Yet from this arrives a newfound sense of logic, as though in pushing beyond—be it into the subconscious or something deeper and less personal—meaning can be found, even if it remains enigmatic in its origin or ends. “Sleep is seen as a place of comfort and there’s an openness discovered in losing one’s own name while dreaming,” Mother Juniper continues. “Sleep becomes a place of truth and a revealer of patterns.” Somewhere to craft new stories, new myths, new ways to define yourself beyond your history or name.

Carolina had the hottest summer she’s ever seen
and I often lose my name in my sleep
but there you go, you’re gone again
you’ve already left and I can’t for the life of me
make up a story that lets me feel easy
make up a story that lets me feel free

‘Carolina’ is out now and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.

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