the publication

There’s such an incredible explosion of musical (cultural/ artistic/ entertainment) choices out there at the moment, even (especially!) in the musical hinterlands, you could be forgiven for not noticing that two of the finest recordings of the past twelvemonth were launched from a tiny Irish label called Deserted Village and its flagship group, the curiously named United Bible Studies. Both 2005’s live disc Airs of Sun and Stone and this year’s The Shore That Fears the Sea stand out in both musicianship and vision, existing at least partly in the neo-avant-folk territory that’s being mined so productively these days, but with a breadth of reach and depth of concept that’s rare to say the least, resulting in two remarkably transcendental and life-affirming recordings.

The live Airs, a 40-minute celebratory morning raga recorded in a big old church-turned-arts-center, comes with tons of you-are-there ambience not unlike some of those classic 60s Sun Ra albums (where the lo-fi room noise becomes part of the aesthetic), with a further theatrical connection in the troupe of dancers that accompanied the performance. And in fact the music too bears a direct relation to the spiritual side of free jazz, as filtered through instrumentation and sensibilities from Celtic folk music, like some old Pharaoh Sanders piece reinterpreted by a congregation of druids. Shore takes a more incantatory tone, both in its ceremonial improvisations and its overall rite shape, and also through the songs, which build on mist-shrouded traditional themes in a melancholy tone that seems a logical extension of Irish folk music as processed through latter-day avant-garde sensibilities – imagine the misty psychedelic folk of the second Sweeney’s Men LP fed through a dark Current 93 filter. It’s an amazing disc that will almost surely appear on lots of “best-of-year” lists come next December.

I’ve occasionally heard it mooted by unenlightened acquaintances—good citizens all, make no mistake—that the general soundtrack ‘round Deep Water Acres seems inordinately focused on things any “normal” person would find difficult to stomach, listening-pleasure-wise. Leaving aside for now the question of why anyone would want to try to digest most of what constitutes mainstream popular culture at the moment, such assertions still remain hard to credit.

In fact, I’ve really got a fair sweet tooth for the sounds of pure pop confection, especially within the tradition of song-creation traceable back to the first flowering of self-conscious rock music in the 1960s, and that, if you know where to look, flourishes to this day (though often safely out of the harsh public eye). Things like a focus on melody and arrangement, experimentation within structure, a sense of balance and proportion, a spirit of play… if I mention the Beatles as a kind of ur-text for what I’m talking about here you can probably get the picture, though of course that model has been remade variously since their time.

Well it’s springtime again; at least that’s what the calendar says. Here at Deep Water we’ve done our best to till the soul soil for another bountiful harvest, and sure enough a whole new pile of bones has come up through the crumbling earth.

First up is the tranquil improvised guitar space of Badgerlore, a psychedelic “supergroup” that started life as the duo of Ben Chasny and Rob Fisk, and has since swelled to include Tom Carter (that guy again!) of Charalambides and Pete Swanson of Yellow Swans. Fisk used to kick it with Deerhoof, but lately focuses energies on operating his excellent Free Porcupine Society label, releasing CDs with all original hand-drawn artwork he does himself, and he also kicks it with angular skronksters, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. With Stories for Owls, Badgerlore employs multiple guitars, piano, mostly wordless vocals and electronics to arrive at some blissfully ragged improvised plateaus, landing somewhere between West and East. There’s definitely a hint of the driving, post Sonic Youth/Velvets atonal guitar clang thang, but these haunted hymns are played slower and lower, occasionally infused with a devotional acid folk quality. In fact, much of this album strikes me as almost religious, vocals approaching Buddhist chant, but smothered with delay and dark ominous drones humming beneath. The recordings of Peter Stapleton’s Metonymic label come to mind, but glimpsed through a West Coast sun kissed forest haze. This one’s for drifting and sifting.

UK ensemble Sculptress evolved from the remnants of A Warm Palindrome, one of the most criminally overlooked bands on the planet. This outfit explored a new kind of music in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s through putting disparate sound elements together in a fragmented and hallucinatory but well-functioning aural body. With a skeleton containing equal amounts of heavy guitar spectacle, sampler effects, electronic manipulations, flowing drones and unexpectedly excellent folk instrumentation Phil Todd, Anthony Joinson, Daz Kirkland, Mikarla Jarvis and Andy Jarvis probably were a few years too early for the whole “free folk” movement. To some extent I’d say that Sculptress (including Joincey, Mikarla Jarvis, Melanie Delaney, Andy Jarvis) kicks off at the same mysterious place where their forefathers left off.

Sculptress is a band that didn’t completely win me over instantly, but as any seasoned fan of weird sounds can tell you, that’s usually a good thing. The growers tend to strike the deepest. Their strangely fractured folk/noise/drone-scapes have become a permanent fixture on my sonic horizon recently. It’s not a sound easily described or enjoyed, but it’s remarkable and utterly original at the same time. To see what keeps these highly imaginative, experimental UK musicians going we contacted Joincey, Mikarla, Andy and Mel for the chat that follows.

I’ve gone all survivalist for this menu, because sometimes you just don’t know when you are going to be left behind by your ride, captured by aliens and deposited in the middle of the outback, or escaped from a backpacker-killing psychopath (Wolf Creek is based on fact, you know). You may not have all of the ingredients below, but hey, imagination and artistic license. Or whatever.

Ingredients

• Kangaroo leg (roadkill of course)
• Worcestershire Sauce
• Garlic cloves
• Mixed herbs
• Half a cup of cooking fat (kangaroo has a really low natural fat content)
• Bottle of Aussie Shiraz
• Cup of water

Directions

Make incisions into leg in three or four places (the Roo’s leg of course, not yours), and pack with cloves of garlic down near the bone.

It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely place for a fertile “head music” scene to emerge than South Africa in the late 60s. With racism and nationalism conjuring a cloud over social and artistic expression in a land isolated from the main stream of Western culture and commerce, it must have seemed that precious stones and metal were all the expedient West wanted from them. But natural forces respect none of these constraints, and the Summer of Love was a force of nature, a vibration that shook the world, with few places untouched by its promise of a passageway through the cosmic eye — Love, Peace and Understanding a possibility if you made the jump. A fertile sub-culture in South Africa did make the jump, creating a unique body of recorded psychedelia and progressive rock. But unlike that other Great Southern Land, Australia, not much escaped to the rest of the world. Unsupported at home, and unable to export their thing, the South Africa head bands generally winked briefly into existence, released what they could, and were gone. Almost.

One of the things that fuels our lives here at Deep Water Acres is a love for various kinds of traditional musics, especially of the Anglo-American and European varieties (respect to our roots, y’know). And so we’re feeling especially honored to have been able to conduct an interview with Irish music legend Andy Irvine. Now, much as we hate to burden anyone with the baggage of over-fulsome praise, it’s hard not to refer to Andy Irvine in terms of “living legendry”. A mainstay of Irish folk music since the mid-1960s, he helped initiate a whole new approach to the tradition via his late 60s work with Sweeney’s Men, spurred the Irish cultural explosion of the 70s with the group Planxty, pioneered several “world music” string-band fusions, and continues making great music to this day. He’s recorded a bushel basket full of classic albums, toured nonstop in various duos and groups, and was a key force in revitalizing how the Irish tradition is both heard and played through his musical innovations, including the introduction of “outside” instruments such as the Greek bouzouki. Much like his counterparts Martin Carthy in England and Dick Gaughan in Scotland, Andy has both deepened and expanded what tradition can do and how it can work. And if all that ain’t enough to raise one to legendary status, I’m not sure I know what is.