We’ve decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. Some cemented themselves early as our favourites of the year, others were relatively late additions that held our attention as the calendars changed, and a few break the rules in being albums released in previous years but earn their inclusion here having proved constant companions through last twelve months.

So here are some records we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

Led by Will Kennedy (Sleeper Records) and supported by the likes of Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps) and Francis Lyon (Ylayali, Free Cake For Every Creature), 22° Halo are something of a Philadelphia DIY lo-fi pop supergroup. Their third release, Garden Bed is as sweet and soft as the peachy pink cover art, taking the gloomy fog of slowcore and holding a light beneath it, the cloud suddenly enveloping and bright. Paired with the earnest tenderness of Kennedy’s vocals, the songs come to feel like old companions. Fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable. Songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.

Advance Base – Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write

Orindal Records

In ‘Kitty Winn’, a song on Advance Base’s 2015 record Nephew in the Wild, Owen Ashworth described watching The Exorcist and recognising the actor from Panic at Needle Park. “It felt like seeing an old friend,” he sings, “The way I wondered where she’d been.” Ashworth has introduced us to a lot of characters of his own over the years, but Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write performs a different kind of introduction. Inspired by the conspicuous absence of karaoke during recent times, the release takes tracks from acts both old and new and reimagines them in the image of Ashworth’s distinctively hushed and empathetic style. With a mixture of classics (Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, St. John Prine) and contemporaries/Orindal Records label mates (Dan Wriggins, Gia Margaret, Wednesday). The collection will resonate differently depending on who’s listening, but chances are there’ll be at least one occasion where the introduction is more like a reintroduction. An old friend smiling through the years, suddenly before you once again. 

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

“I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on ‘Michaelangelo’, the opening track from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. “And part of me,” she continues, “will always be looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s one of the few tracks that directs its focus on Jenkins herself rather than reflections from those around her. The record is inspired by the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, an artist who explored the line between allegory and abstraction with an intuitive fluidity, and Jenkins follows this lead to spin her surroundings into representations of her own. Be that the characters and objects encountered in the travel diary of ‘Hard Drive’, the accumulated wisdom of ‘New Bikini’, or the startlingly pretty instrumentation that builds across the record thanks to a whole host of musicians. Songs shaped by Jenkins’s careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will.

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

The first full length by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris, Five clusters takes inspiration from nature’s long game. With subtle intricacies growing from every crevice, its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. The sense of some circular pattern, the past returning as the future, post-humanity imagined as prehistoric verdancy. The sensation is both delicate and strangely visceral. Keyed into the botanical surface and the supporting undergrowth, where fine mycelium threads facilitate pungent decomposition, enriching the soil so that the songs might bloom with their damp, bodily life.     

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

The world of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is familiar in the way a dream is familiar. Or is that foreign in the way dreams are foreign? Damien Jurado presents each track as a space between the known and unknown, their characters hanging on in the hope such positions are transitory, and in doing so blurs the line between the characters and the songwriter himself. Take Majestic centrepiece ‘Johnny Caravella’, which calls to mind ‘Percy Faith’ from The Horizon Just Laughed but this time takes inspiration from fictional DJ Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati. But ‘taking inspiration’ doesn’t quite capture the song’s true extent, as Jurado channels the fictional doctor, his delivery neither quite Fever or himself but a blend of the two. “Who’ll wear the crown when the change is approaching / Of some other season renown?” this hybrid figure asks as the track winds tighter with every line. This latent intensity is brought to the surface in the finale, an urgent beseeching that we hang on a little longer. “As I exited north the radio spoke / ‘All is not lost even if you’re without a direction’,” goes the final verse. “Go west, go west, 1972 / The sun hasn’t set, the stars very few / Just stick around ’til the light pushes into the darkness.”

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the opening track of what is The Felice Brothers’ eighth and perhaps most compelling record, finds two people fleeing their old lives. It’s never revealed exactly what Helen and The Sheriff are leaving in the rear-view mirror of their “doomed Corvette,” but what waits for them at the end of the road is imagined in vivid detail. Helen dreams of the apocalypse arriving as an anthropomorphic tornado, as poisoned lakes and acid rain, a force as “loud as a mushroom cloud” yet “ghostly like a glockenspiel.” The Sheriff disagrees, tries to “make a distinction between death and extinction” as Helen spits melon seeds and drinks 7-Up in his car. His is an apocalypse stripped of its fictions and graces. No saving angels, no hand of God, no spared billionaires on Mars. The track is the standard bearer of From Dreams to Dust. A record of cutting fury and crushing sadness set to rich and affirming rhythms. Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase. A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive. “What is freedom?” The Sheriff wonders in his closing verse. To be empty of desire? To find everything we’ve lost or have been in search of? Does it feel like jazz on the autobahn?

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

The side project of Have a Nice Life’s Dan Barrett, Giles Corey picked up the threads of Deathconsciousness and followed them deep underground. The self-titled record, originally released in 2011 but given a new lease of life by The Flenser for its tenth anniversary, feels like a haunting committed to tape. At once intense and eerily hushed, spacious yet claustrophobic, lonely but never alone. A picture of depression as an intensely personal experience which nevertheless transcends the individual. A torment too large for a single skin. When ‘Empty Churches’ opens with paranormal investigator Raymond Cass talking of voices of unknown origin appearing on radio frequencies, the mood is not so much disturbing as alluring. A dimension beyond all this. Something to lose yourself in. To submit to. To hope for beyond all we know and can know, in spite of it all.

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

Described as a record about “respite and the coast, poetically and literally,” Shade is every bit as considered and in-depth as you might expect from an album fifteen years in the making. The mutual relationship between person and place is conjured with Harris’s cloudy abstraction, the line between strange and familiar blurred beyond its binary simplicity, and so too the border between intimacy and solitude. An overarching sense of a distance drapes over the record, evoking isolation in space or time, and the hushed tone carries with it hidden depths which speak to the unknowable nature of the sea. The result is simultaneously elemental and fundamentally human, and one of Grouper’s finest records to date.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

The Hold Steady universe has always been something of a gauntlet for its characters. A high-speed race with a whole lot of entrants but not so many finishers. To say Open Door Policy picks up with these winners is to assume the race has finished, when in fact it has merely changed. The participants are older, their communities atomised, their world having been sliced up and commodified by tech-savvy barons both ruthless and polite. In this way, the band’s eighth album feels a closer descendant of Craig Finn’s solo records than more recent Hold Steady records. A considered, cohesive album of narrative-driven songs which offer glimpses into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving. Finn & Co. mean many different things to many different people, but too often their work is (mis)understood as a mere good time. As though the joy of The Hold Steady is solely the joy of the party. But like so many of their records before it, Open Door Policy is proof of something deeper and more profound. The quiet, ugly dignity of humans persevering, and the irreplaceable value of a community to see them through.

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

Glass delusion is a manifestation of a psychiatric phenomenon witnessed primarily across the wealthy classes of Early Modern Europe where the individual feared they were made of glass. King Charles VI of France allegedly forbade anyone from touching him, so acute was his fear of shattering, and took to wearing protective clothing. It was a fear intensely human yet inorganic, recasting life as a path with danger around every bend. Chicago‘s KUZU throw us into such a heightened state, their improvisational jazz guarding its hand, leaving the listener no choice but to strap in and follow the slow-burning yet ever shifting lines. But from within the anxiety of this undetermined ride, an overarching conviction emerges. The sense everything is barrelling toward some spectacular finale. The dreadful shattering event. The screw turns and turns, the sound needling with increasingly deranged energy, leaving the listener like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, tearing their surroundings rather than break apart themselves.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her name in poetry, fiction, music and scholarship, and Theory of Ice feels like a culmination of this body of work. A lesson in world building, in communication, in history and preservation and life. A weapon against settler colonisation that carries no dull weight or serrated edge, indeed no violence at all. “The settler colonial state is not hated, it is pitied,” describes Steven Lambke in the liner notes, “for its smallness, its evil, its perpetual cruelty.” Theory of Ice turns this force against itself, utilising an absence of violence to illuminate the absence within violence. The dark, meaningless lacuna at the heart of the imperialist project, a space never filled despite the visceral physicality of its rule. Moreover, Simpson evokes the persistent presence of the peoples who have suffered at its hand, kept alive in acts of community and gesture, in the work of a searching artist’s life. “In realization / we don’t exist without each other,” go the record’s closing lines. “She says: there’s nothing about you / I’m not willing to know.”

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

To describe the career of Macie Stewart is to describe a career of collaboration. The multi-instrumentalist founded bands such as Kids These Days, Marrow and OHMME, played as part of Ken Vandermark’s Marker ensemble, improvisational act The Few and with Lia Kohl as a violin/cello duo, as well as lending her talents to records by a plethora of acts including V.V. Lightbody, Whitney, Adeline Hotel and S.Z.A. But within these collaborations, Stewart became aware her own individual sound was being left to atrophy. Indeed, she had no idea what her individual sound might be. With its unflinching eye and succulent arrangements, Mouth Full of Glass represents an attempt to find out. An artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration, leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past. “What pleasure I choose to keep after I buried it deep,” as Stewart sings across the sinuous sax of ‘Garter Snake’. “Try to uncover it all.”

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

On Dream Violence, Naarm/Melbourne-based Michael Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique. Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence. Ripping rockers rub shoulders with heartfelt piano ballads and genuine, capital-E earworms, all in an attempt to communicate what Beach describes as “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

Following on from 2020’s stunning Azaela, Natalie Jane Hill’s second record sees a reversal of perspective. Because while the first album looked to the expansive roll of the land for its focus, Solely turns inward to examine an environment far more personal. Themes of loss and loneliness emerge from this introspection, by-products of any quest for self-discovery, though Hill’s intricate arrangements are too deft and nuanced to be consumed by such emotions. What instead emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

Across five albums, Protomartyr’s Joe Casey has cemented his status as a cynic in both the ancient and modern sense. A fatalistic Irish Catholic from working class Detroit writing songs that weave dense webs of references to ancient philosophy and arcane literature. The everyday man alienated, an outsider enraged at what is unfolding around him. Written during a spell of illness, Ultimate Success Today sees Casey confront not only his own mortality but the wider prospect of hope in the contemporary neoliberal society. His father, whose untimely death has haunted each Protomartyr album to varying degrees, died during a routine medical procedure, and Casey’s pain is matched by a dread of the doctor’s office. A cynicism of medicine rooted not in partisan politics or misinformation but existential terror—the sense even the surgeons won’t be able to save him. The explicit goodbye of closing track ‘Worm in Heaven’ might play as a cathartic acknowledgement of this fear, but Casey chooses to undercut himself, mocking his own attempts to conquer dread through music. A cynicism wrapped around itself to include a doubt in the utility or power of art. “Dumb aphorist embrace obscurants,” he sings of himself on ‘The Aphorist’, “and write in ogham for your final lines.” A cynic, old and new, to the very end.

R.A.P. Ferreira – The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Self-released

Whether recording as milo, scallops hotel or most recently R.A.P. Ferreira, Nashville-based Rory Ferreira has been releasing some of the most inventive and interesting rap music of the past few years. The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures is his most cohesive record to date, the full maturity of his lyricism on show without losing any of the DIY aesthetic that has long lended his work its authenticity. Because Ferreira is a rapper in the purest sense. A radical, a philosopher, a comedian. Interested in nothing but the words. “What’s morbid is there’s poets who want to be on the Forbes List,” he sings on ‘uptown 37’, “I will be gorgeous and homeless.” And gorgeous this is, the lyrics skating over a whole gamut of moods and subjects, reaching for whatever cultural reference he can get his hands on, however high or low. Where else are you going to find Ansel Adams, Inspector Clouseau, Euripedes and Mr Bean all living on the same record?

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

Born into a family of musicians and folklorists, Renée Reed grew up amid the best of Cajun and Creole music. Her work contains a hundred shades and small details pointing toward this history, but its lasting influence is less tangible. A sense of intuition threads through the songs. A phenomenon which lends them a certain timelessness, the sense they haven’t been so much written as teased out of some half-remembered space. The intricate arrangements are rendered simple in their instinctive rhythm, Reed’s poetic lyrics given the weight of the land. “We’d stand in the dark and cry,” she sings near the end of the record, “Oh, if only we could / For our bones, they belong to the country.” These songs feel like they belong to the country too, Reed more a guardian than a creator. For now they are travelling with her, and a worthy custodian she makes. 

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

The UK has always been a kind of dreamstate. A society held up on imagined pasts and false notions, a deluded fantasy stretched to breaking point yet never relinquishing its hold. This dark dread is in the dense Twin Peakian synths of Honest Labour’s opening moments, but Manchester‘s Space Afrika are here to do more than recapitulate the moribund British dream. For within the dreamstate live the dreamers, and each dreamer—however isolated and despondent—has their own dreams. Feeling more like a documentary than album, the record details the visions of this nameless population. A tessellated blend of samples, field recordings and vocal cameos which emerge haphazardly from dark layers of instrumentation. The result is an expressionistic picture of a society, one dazed and delirious, left to wander this long night with all their love and fear and loss in the hope some dawn might lend this intangible reality some weight.  

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

Take a look at the artwork of Sun June’s Somewhere and you might see a pillar of smoke gradually fade into a pastel sky. The image is fitting for a sound they developed on 2018’s Years, a record of gently swaying country pop songs which traced feelings of loss and grief as they dispersed into the wider context of a life. Sadness drifting away from its source, becoming more translucent with distance but always present in some diffuse concentration. Though clearly building on the previous record, Somewhere sees a certain inversion. Love stirs from within the tracks and with it a poppier, full-bodied sound. The sense the quiet melancholy is coalescing into something more tangible and immediate, gathering weight and sinking toward some intensity on the ground. Perhaps we got it backward, we’re looking at the artwork upside down.

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven. An introspective album which excavates personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder. Be it musing on the pasts that were and the presents that never came to be, or the unknown futures still up in the air. Imagery of beds and sleep recurs across the record, and the songs come to knit their own mattress and sheets. A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand. 

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

Listening to Chicago’s Tobacco City is to be transported to the imagined locale of its title, a loving patchwork of country music settings; like searching for radio waves from a porchside rocking chair or feeding quarters into a jukebox in the musty refuge of a dark barroom. Lonesome ballads wind slow with regret and pedal steel, folk songs get cosmic on sunburn and psychedelics, and honky-tonk shuffles flow easy as that three-beers-in second wind after a long day on the production line. Hard-earned wisdom sits side by side with wry humour, capturing the tragedy, hope and absurdity of broken people going about their lives the best they can. Riding out heartbreak on the buzz of cheap booze and bright lights. As Lexi Goddard sings at one point, “Being alone ain’t so bad when you’re half in the bag.”

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

“I never believed in the robber,” sings The Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman on Ignorance’s opening track. “I never saw nobody climb over my fence.” The lines contain a multitude of meanings. Stress a different word and you get a different shade of the album’s eponymous state. The robber doesn’t exist. At least to my knowledge. At least not around these parts. But the truth lies in the volatile swirl of instrumentation, a jazzy swell of cymbals and piano and drums, sax licking staccato like the devil’s tongue or the threatening word of God. ‘Robber’ is a confession, a plea, a waking fever dream. The colonial past and capitalist present manifest in all its unease. A violence which seeps out, haunting even the record’s most tender moments. Lindeman repeatedly turns to the natural world as an escape, from the birds of ‘Parking Lot’ to the “cold metallic scent of snow” in ‘Subdivisions’, the sky, the green, the soft of ‘Heart’. But as it says in ‘Loss’, “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” Nature might still persist, but it is the robber who built the world around us. His hand is still in our pockets. Even the sunset on ‘Atlantic’ is blood red.

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Though Twin Plagues is a record of memories, there’s nothing polished about the experiences being relayed, no rose-tinted gloss applied through repeated telling. There’s no nostalgia either. No intention to preserve or wish to return. Rather, Wednesday portray the past as something still present. The rugged surface across which the present is overlain. Its contours reveal itself on even the most ordinary days, be it in the gut-drop of a missed step, a suddenly interrupted view. Memories held for no good reason, not exclusively bad but always haunting. Memories as they return to you in dreams. The kid with a fucked up buzzcut. The burned down Dairy Queen. Birds in the air, flies in the bug light, brawls at the baseball and crossbows in old family photographs. Sometimes these memories are traumatic, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they mean nothing beyond their own shape and texture but then again, that’s just how life unfolds.        

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

Even in the crowded field of the internet age, Wendy Eisenberg stands apart in their prolific invention. Since the beginning of 2020, they have released at least five solo records (as well as working as part of Editrix), each offering intricate and thematically precise sounds which serve as frameworks through which to examine a particular space or time. The latest, Bent Ring, began as a self-imposed challenge to make an album with no guitar, but really stands apart in the direction of its gaze. A record looking back across a period of great productivity and achievement nevertheless attenuated by the hostile conditions of the surrounding environment. A contemplation of what it means to be an artist in our world, and how the endurance, commitment, frustration and joy of the vocation come to shape the artist too. With the earthy, temperamental twang of its salvaged banjo, Bent Ring encapsulates both the exhaustion and energy of an artist’s life, its steadfast rhythm always threatening to slow or speed up but ultimately pressing on regardless.     

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

“Silos stand like chapels / Chapels stand like graves / Graves stand like corn / Corn stands like waves.” So opens ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of Wes Tirey’s tenth album. One populated with blue heron and crawdads and creek beds, a land of fields and factories stalked by stray dogs and innumerable ghosts. But more than a survey of this very American landscape, Tirey offers us characters too. People presented in snatches, sometimes nothing more than the distinctive ring of their voice. What emerges is not a clear narrative, at least not in the linear sense, but rather a patchwork of vignettes which combine into a picture far larger and more extensive. The dead are plural in this book, and each has their own story to tell.

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

A fundamentally exploratory songwriter, Will Stratton has never been one to settle in a single groove. But if one feature has stretched through his work, it’s the art of introspection. But then came the late 2010s and the intensification of our rightward spiral down. Faced with such pressing political issues, Stratton went into The Changing Wilderness with a new desire to engage with the wider world. To write a record which might catalogue the atrocities of this moment. As he sings on ‘When I’ve Been Born (I’ll Love You)’: “The present is prosaic / The future, a disgrace / We can’t just look away now / It stares us in the face.” Capturing the tone of the record, the song charts the profound sickness of our times, and can’t help but slip back toward self-examination in the face of such horror. A search which emerges with no solution beyond a determination to face the worst undaunted. “When I get my prize, I’ll love you,” goes the chorus. “As the oceans rise, I’ll love you / When the air gеts thin, I’ll love you / If the fascists win, I’ll love you.”

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in list of songs we missed in 2021, which will be published shortly. And of course, there were lots of amazing records that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

The post Albums We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Our choice of songs for this one perhaps isn’t the most subtle, and might well highlight our naivety/ignorance when it comes to the geographic differences between American folk music, but we just went with tracks which we felt capture the mood of Hinojosa’s work in some way. The tracklisting carries links to the artists we’ve covered in the past, if you want to read our thoughts on their music.

Tracklisting:

1) Will the Circle Be Unbroken – Marisa Anderson
2) Floating Rhododendron – Sarah Louise
3) Out West – The Coal Creek Boys
4) Fable – Sam Moss
5) Impress My Memory – Stephen Steinbrink
6) Sometimes – Noel’le Longhaul
7) Hands in Our Names – Karima Walker
8) Mexican Blanket – Wes Tirey
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) Around and Around – Mountain Man
11) Revelation Drift – dbh
12) Dark Was the Night – Ry Cooder

The post Rolando Hinojosa – Klail City appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Because we still have a fair amount of tapes left, and obviously want to raise as much as possible for Worldreader, we have decided to run a special holiday offer. So, as suggested below in stylised sans serif, entering the code ‘HOHOHO’ at the checkout on Bandcamp will get you a handsome 40% off both digital and physical copies of the compilation. This will still cover the production cost of the cassette, but remember all profits go to charity, so every extra pound you give will be a pound well spent.To refresh your memory, here’s what you’ll be getting if you put some of your hard earned cash towards Quiet, Constant Friends:

Side A

Danielle Fricke – The Well
Lotte Kestner – Cattleya
Wes Tirey – Akhnilo Blues
Pasture Dog – Everything That Rises Must Converge
Old Earth – Pretty Steep
Salt Altars – Little Big Man
Henry Demos – Not Her
Beat Radio – Mexico City
Sondra Sun-Odeon – Hair

Side B

Nathan Amundson – Haruki Murakami
Windmill – Jim & The Rather Large Nectarine
ARMS – The Book of Love
Oh, Rose & Sawtooth – TV
Free Cake For Every Creature – Don’t Go Away (Ahumpf Acgroof)
John Ross – The Overlook Hotel
Kissing Fractures – I Drank Phosphorus With Aunt Lucy
Nice Legs – Past Lives
Ben Seretan – King of Crumbs
Trouble Books – Oak and Linden Tree Abridged
Lewtrakimou – I’m a Book on Tape
Nadia Reid – Runway

Grab a download or cassette now via our Bandcamp page, and be sure to remember to use the code ‘HOHOHO’ for your discount.

The post Quiet Constant Friends: A Christmas Sale (40% Off!) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The tape is packed with so many vivid images that the bigger picture becomes indistinct, like the recollections of a man so old and tired that the border between reality and fantasy has become porous”

The track draws inspiration from two works of literature: The title is taken from the James Salter story ‘Akhnilo’ and the falcon/falconer imagery was plucked out of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’.

The artwork for this one is by Erika.

You can buy Quiet, Constant Friends now the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. All tapes come with super-limited edition postcard art prints, and all profits will go to Worldreader.

The post Quiet, Constant Friends: Wes Tirey – Akhnilo Blues appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers”

So says Charles William Eliot, and I tend to agree with him. And not just because I’ve thrown my lot in with the literary world. Books are where you learn that others share your weirdest thoughts and experiences, and are able to describe them in a way that makes you want to squee with delight or tattoo the words into your skin. What’s more, they let you experience life as someone else, allowing you to get a grip on the unseen forces which batter some while you relax in ignorant shelter. I can confidently say I would be a different person had I not become acquainted with John Singer and Don Gately and Ignatius J. Reilly, with JR from New York and Ruthie from Fingerbone and Oscar Wao from the Dominican Republic, now of Paterson, New Jersey. That’s without mentioning Esther Greenwood or Hazel Motes or the Glass family, nor Mr Small or Spot the Dog or any of the menagerie of Redwall mammals, ie. any of the hundreds of fictional folk who helped build the world as I now see it.

If, then, you cannot read, you automatically miss out on an army* of literary friends to entertain you and hold your hand and generally remind you that you are not alone. You may or may not know that UNESCO estimate there are 757 million adults, including 115 million youths (15-24), who cannot read or write the simplest of sentences. They even have a cool interactive map to give you a better idea of where the problem is biggest.

Worldreader is non-profit organisation dedicated to creating a literate world through digital education. Their Worldreader Mobile app (available on even the simplest feature phones) brings digital books to families around the planet, allowing communities without access to any print books to connect to a library of over 28,500 titles in over 40 languages. And this sort of programme extends far further than helping people gain basic skills. Take the current Ebola outbreak as an example. With such a deadly disease it can be difficult to provide adequate information to those in danger, particularly when moving around increases the risk of transmission and worsens the situation. Worldreader are utilising their mobile reading app to disseminate information to help save lives, from vital health advice to inspiring stories from survivors, while minimising the need for movement on the ground, and thus transmission.

Of course, all this ignores the whole special, reading-as-a-magic-activity side of things that Charles William Eliot was getting at. Books are fun and comforting and inspiring and door-unlocking in so many ways, and I believe quite firmly that increasing the number of young people reading is one of the best ways to deal with current issues and prepare ourselves for future ones. Worldreader actively curates books by African and Indian authors, so rather than just beaming the same dusty classics all over the world, they’ve developed a library representative of the diversity of interests, tastes and subjects seen around the globe. Better still, the mobile aspect will help transform education into an unstoppable force. No longer will your gender or religion or race prevent access to education, nor any disabilities, nor your social standing. With a small amount of help from charities like Worldreader, we can overcome privilege and prejudice by placing education in the hands of the people. We can be each other’s quiet, constant friends.

It’s all pretty inspiring. So much so that I decided to try to help with my own version of community and worldwide collaboration. Quiet, Constant Friends, a compilation of literary-themed songs by some of my favourite artists, will be sold in support of Worldreader, with every penny of the profits going straight into their good work. Some of the songs were recorded especially for this release, some are from upcoming albums and others are old favourites which fit nicely with the theme. You can listen to one new track, ‘I’m a Book on Tape’ by Lewtrakimou, right now:

I’ll be unveiling more songs between now and release, so keep your eyes peeled for that, and check out the artwork and full tracklisting below:

1. The Well – Danielle Fricke
2. Cattleya – Lotte Kestner
3. Akhnilo Blues – Wes Tirey
4. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Pasture Dog
5. Pretty Steep – Old Earth
6. Little Big Man – Salt Altars
7. Not Her – Henry Demos
8. Mexico City – Beat Radio
9. Hair – Sondra Sun-Odeon
10. Haruki Murakami – Nathan Amundson (of Rivulets)
11. Jim and the Rather Large Nectarine – Windmill
12. The Book of Love – ARMS
13. TV – Oh, Rose & Sawtooth
14. Don’t Go Away Ahumpf Acgroomf – Free Cake For Every Creature
15. The Overlook Hotel – John Ross
16. I Drank Phosphorus with my Aunt Lucy – Kissing Fractures
17. Past Lives – Nice Legs
18. King of Crumbs – Ben Seretan
19. Oak and Linden Tree Abridged – Trouble Books
20. I’m a Book on Tape – Lewtrakimou
21. Runway – Nadia Reid

As if collaborating with 20-odd acts wasn’t exciting enough, we’ve also enlisted the talents of a range of artists and illustrators to design special-edition postcards for each song. Again, I’ll be unveiling these as time goes on, but check out the piece for Lewtrakimou’s song by Ji Hyun Yu below:Huge, huge, huge thanks go out to everyone involved. It has been so great to see how nice and enthusiastic people can be about a simple idea, and how it can evolve into something much better than I ever expected. I owe you all.

Quiet Constant Friends is out now. You can buy it from our Bandcamp page, including a limited edition cassette, complete with some super-limited edition art postcard prints (you can browse the complete set of artworks here).We decided against having this as a free download in an attempt to raise as much for Worldreader as we possibly can. Obviously, if you choose to pay more than the suggested amount you are donating more to Worldreader, so feel free to do that. That said, we know times are tough, so if anyone wants a download, just drop us a message/tweet/email and we’ll sort you out, no questions asked.

* I’m taking suggestions for the best collective noun for friends who only exist in books.

The post Wake The Deaf presents… Quiet, Constant Friends appeared first on Various Small Flames.

March has gone and Spring has sprung. If you were too busy trying to top up your vitamin D levels with every weak little sunbeam then fear not, we have collected everything featured on Wake The Deaf in one handy little playlist. Follow the links in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the relevant pages.

We are taking a short break over Easter to gather our thoughts and hopefully return with something shiny and new. No promises just yet but keep an eye here, Twitter or Facebook for developments. Until then!

Tracklisting:

1. i. – Danielle Fricke
2. Dk/Pi – Aero Flynn
3. Summering – Summering
4. Chapter 1 – Human Behavior
5. Dogs 1 – Vio/Miré
6. A Home Just Over Yonder – Frankie Duff
7. M.M.G.A.T.M – Field Medic
8. Broken Necks – Eskimeaux
9. Maybe I’m Wasting My Time – Jake Rollins
10. God is Laughing at Me – Butterfly House
11. Hold Me Like a Child – GOOD, GOOD BLOOD
12. Invisible Cities – Beat Radio
13. Somebody Kill Me Please – LVL UP
14. The Plane – Andrew Hung
15. Roles Reversed – Kid In The Attic
16. Floral Mattress – Naps
17. Tennis – Derek Piotr
18. The Day is Past and Gone – Jean Ritchie
19. The Day is Past and Gone (Variations) – Sarah Louise
20. Buffalo Bones – Wes Tirey
21. Don’t Go – Radical Dads
22. Lucky Man – Joplin Rice
23. Billy Madison Victory Song – Krill
24. Demise – Psalmships

March 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post March 2015 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

In a recent interview, we asked North Carolinan folk musician Sarah Louise to name five acts that ours readers should hear. One of her suggestions was Wes Tirey, a familiar name around here – we have already reviewed his albums, collaborations and indeed even chatted with him too. Wes has since put out the tape Louise mentioned on Columbus label Cabin Floor Esoterica.

‘Old Ohio Blues’ starts the release as it means to go on, a slow, sad folk song surrounded by atmospheric drone which creeps and clings like an oneiric fog. A similar technique is employed across the remaining songs, the combination of traditional folk and electronic effects producing a sound that is disconcerting and alluring, Tirey’s vocals cutting through the mist like an unknown narrator, doomed to repeat his regrets. ‘Ballad of the Black Hills Woman’ plays like the late night echoes of a man who has outlived his company, while ‘The Body’s Better’ tells of someone so indebted to their vices that they have given up pretending otherwise. ‘Akhnilo Blues’ reduces the ambient levels in favour of stark guitar and ‘Mexican Blanket’ offers an evocative instrumental interlude, the ever-present reverb creating a strange sense that the song is a recording of the song, a memory that has not lost its lustre. Closer ‘Buffalo Bones’ is a current favourite, combining macabre dream imagery with a tender beauty, creating a song that’s unsettling and striking and would please any of the past masters.

“And I dream the trees were singing
and I dream the river was on fire
and I dream rattlesnakes were upon me,
and my name was cursed for all time.
And I dream the sky had teeth
and I dream of buffalo bones
and I dream the moon was bleeding
and I dream my body was stone.
And I dream of your lily white hands
and I dream of the flowers on your dress
and I dream wild horses surround you
and I dream your stomach grew.”

The tape is packed with so many vivid images that the bigger picture becomes indistinct, like the recollections of a man so old and tired that the border between reality and fantasy has become porous. Gripped by a fever dream, he is desperate and delirious but determined to say what needs to be said before time runs out on him.

All this is a way of saying that Journeyer/Forward, Melancholy Dream is one of Tirey’s best yet. The release is available as a great little cassette via Cabin Floor Esoterica (see below). While you are there, why not dig into the Cabin Floor back catalogue? But consider yourself warned: it can eat up your day pretty quick.

The post Wes Tirey – Journeyer/Forward, Melancholy Dream appeared first on Various Small Flames.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Field Guide, a really great album from North Carolina native Sarah Louise. Despite being entirely instrumental, the album is incredibly deep. As we said in our review, “Louise manages to circumvent the skin-deep and decidedly human introspection that occupies most genres in favour of something larger and wider, resonating on a deeper level. The songs speak of an association with nature that makes everything else appear incidental, a connection that humanity has attempted to sever for millennia without ever quite succeeding. In this way the album is both sad and joyous, a reminder of all we have missed and all there is left to experience, the terrifying, heartbreaking and glorious comfort that we, as humans, are an oh-so-small part of an oh-so-wonderful world”.

Luckily for us, Sarah agreed to discuss Field Guide with us, and her answers to our questions explore the album’s themes and inspirations far better than we ever could.

Hello Sarah, I hope you are well! How is life in North Carolina this time of year?

Life is good! In some ways the tail end of Winter is the sweetest time of year because I know there is so much amazing weather ahead of me!

It’s clear that Field Guide is influenced heavily by the natural world. Would you say that nature plays a big role in your life and creative process?

I’m so glad that comes across. Nature is the most constant interest I have had in my life. Even when I was little I felt so bonded to it. I would literally read and memorize field guides, a pastime which still serves me well in my life in the mountains of North Carolina. It’s medicine for me and my greatest source of inspiration.

The other big influence is traditional folk music. How much has this shaped your music? I’m not a specialist in the taxonomy of traditional music but is there a particular branch that you see yourself aligned to?  

I’ve enjoyed the diversity of American traditional music for long enough that it is in my DNA and peeks out when it wants to. However, I wrote a couple of the songs on “Field Guide” around two specific lined-out hymns. I thought of my interaction with the material as a way of honouring these amazing women of song,like placing flowers around a sacred object. In some of the songs on “Field Guide” I was dealing with similarities between Appalachian music and Hindustani and Carnatic music. For example, harmony was not allowed in some of the more
conservative southern churches and was instead replaced by drones, rich melodies and melisma. These characteristics are also hallmarks of Indian music, as well as many other kinds of traditional music from around the world. To me, these connections speak to the ancientness of some of these mountain melodies (although I can’t prove their origins). I certainly don’t want to reduce the complexities or distinctiveness of these individual traditions, but I find inspiration in the similarities.

*Here are traditional recordings of the lined out hymns that Sarah mentions above, and I’ve included her guitar versions so you can compare and contrast. First is ‘The Day is Past and Gone’ by Jean Ritchie:

…and secondly ‘A Home Just Over Yonder’ by Frankie Duff:

It’s not that difficult to notice that the album isn’t a completely happy one, that’s not to say it doesn’t have little bright moments of joy, but it has varying shades of emotion, and sadness is certainly well-represented. This captures perfectly my feelings on nature – namely that it is an incomprehensibly amazing thing, but something facing the dire consequences of us as a species. Did you set out to write something that touched upon not only the joy of natureitself but also the sad fact that so many people are now disconnected from it?

What’s interesting about writing music for me is that sometimes when I am sad, I write joyful-sounding music, and sometimes when I am joyful, melancholy will emerge in a piece. I think that speaks to music’s wideness and strength as an expressive medium that goes beyond language or individual emotions. I didn’t set out to have “Field Guide” express sadness or joy about a particular topic, although it is safe to say that some of my deepest sadness stems from my concern about our culture’s disconnection from nature and the empty consumerism that can follow. And my greatest moments of joy are often in the woods, making little discoveries or feeling connected to the life around me.

*We asked Sarah to share a photograph that sums up Field Guide for her. It was an impossible question and she admitted defeat, but did share this picture of a Wake Robin, a species from the genus Trillium, which is one of her favourite wildflowers native to North Carolina.*

The music on Field Guide feels old – if you played it to a random sample of the general public, I reckon lots of them would place it somewhere in the formative years of the previous century – is that something you set out to achieve, this timeless quality, or is it more a consequence of your inspiration/influences?

It wasn’t an intention to write something that sounded timeless, but I just tried to be as honest and exploratory during my process as I could be. I have never wanted to write music that sounded like anyone else, but it makes me feel good that you think it sounds timeless. Thank you!

Does the album also have a more intimate, personal scope? Track titles like ‘Dog Improv’ and ‘Late Summer Seed Collection’ seem to suggest that the album as also inspired by personal memories.

Some of the titles are definitely inspired by my memories. I kept a seed collection when I was a kid in a large file drawer, which I lovingly labeled and alphabetized. And I still save seeds from/for my garden! The origin of the music itself is more difficult to pin down. I don’t know exactly where it comes from. I’m glad it’s a little bit mysterious.

This new version of Field Guide is entirely instrumental. Was this a conscious choice for this release or did the songs naturally take that direction? How do you decide when to include vocals on your tracks?

I always aim to have my pieces function first and foremost as instrumentals. In most cases I have added vocals only once the guitar part is finished. I’m starting to explore the possibility of writing instrumental and vocal parts simultaneously as a way to shake-up my process if nothing else. Scissor Tail Editions releases almost exclusively instrumental music, and since the pieces for the most part already functioned without vocals, it felt fine to cut them.

Could you list four or five artists/bands you really like and think people should hear? They could be new or not so new or one hundred years dead, whatever you like.

Asheville, North Carolina has a stellar scene, particularly for guitar music. Shane Parish
has a new tape out on Marmara Records called “Odei”, which is incredible for its inventiveness and is an absolute pleasure to listen to. I’m also a huge fan of Tashi Dorji who can say more in 3 seconds worth of guitar than many, many words could express. He has an upcoming album on Asheville-based Bathetic Records. Wes Tirey, who I think you’ve also featured (J: yes we have), is a Scissor Tail alum and a great player/songster (and has new tape out on Cabin Floor Esoterica). And my friend Emmalee Hunnicutt is a hypnotic, soulful cello composer who also collaborates with Shane Parish. That better be the last one or I won’t know where to stop!

The post Interview: Sarah Louise appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting

1. Saturday Night – The Wooden Sky
2. Wings – Field Report
3. Infestation – Bear Medicine
4. Cigarettes – Oquoa
5. Chris Bell – M. Lockwood Porter
6. Ride On, Molina – Rivulets
7. Farewell Transmission – Songs: Ohia
8. HSKT – Sylvan Esso
9. Reconstruct (feat. Seafloor) – Photay
10. Second Night – Mansionair
11. Beacon – DEAREST
12. Sweetness – Wayne Szalinksi
13. Yellow Leaves – Ezkiel
14. Travel Advisory – Baby Mollusk
15. ESRT (2001) – Whatever, Dad
16. Black Kettle – Real Life Buildings
17. Six Dollar Sunglasses – Steve Palmer
18. I Have Heard of a Land – C.Strøm
19. Blue Ridge Mountain Blues – Wes Tirey
20. Breaking Bad – Talons’
21. Raft – Sarah Winchester
22. Ontario Gothic – Foxes in Fiction
23. Thrown – Kiasmos
24. You (Nate Connelly Rework) – Nils Frahm
25. Form By Firelight (With Raphaelle Standell) – Jon Hopkins
26. Lights – Mt. Judge
27. I Love – David Karsten Daniels

Remember that we make a mix like this every month, so if you want even more cool new music then head over to the Wake the Deaf 8tracks page, or read the site itself!

October 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post October 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

O, Annihilator sees Tirey use an ambient/drone backing that gives the songs a more cinematic feel, pushing the boundaries of folk music while still retaining that traditional quality. As a result, the album could fall into that dreaded category of “experimental”. However, this isn’t experimental in the usual sense, where incongruous sounds are played in the hope of finding some strange off-centre union. O, Annihilator may bring technology into traditional folk but it does so in a harmonious way, where every ambient drone sounds natural and vital to the atmosphere of the track.

Tirey’s previous two releases have been instrumental, so it is very nice to hear the man sing again. He has this tremulous singing voice and he delivers his lines with a real earnestness. Sometimes lovelorn, sometimes weary, he sounds (and writes) a lot older that he actually is. It brings to mind a description of old-time folk singer Dock Boggs by writer William Gay in an essay for Oxford American (and part of the wonderful collection, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More),

“Boggs’s voice here sounds so dissociated it seems to be coming not just from some other time but from outside time itself.”

I’m no folk scholar, so I may be very wrong here, but for me ‘traditional folk’ is less about a particular instrument or sound and more centred on an attitude, a way of writing and playing that exists well beyond the banjo or steel guitar. Tirey writes the sort of songs that sound like oral histories, passed down to him to be passed on again, owned by no-one, there for anyone to interpret.  They sound like the remembered words of forgotten men.

You can buy the album now from Full Spectrum Records, either digitally via Bandcamp or on limited edition cassette.

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