#lobby art

[xxnotinmylobbyxx]

S C O T

[sykam0re]

fish noodle...

[gacougnol]

Henry Birdsey - pedal steel, lap steel, tape machines

Bob Driftwood - banjo

Harper Reed - shepherd's bells

Al Lakely - 12-string guitar

Ira Dorset - fiddle

(via ▶︎ Sewn the Name | Old Saw | Lobby Art)

[soaked-doors]

“no one is born in this world to be alone!”

[ato-dato]

My beloveds

[luuurien]

Old Saw - Sewn the Name

(Ambient Americana, Drone, Avant-Folk)

Moving from the pastures to the farmhouse, Old Saw’s latest album is a darker, dustier collection of ambient folk music where Americana and Appalachian folk are given jagged edges and cold textures. As the quintet tear apart the earthy loam of their sound, Sewn the Name leaves you stranded in some of their most immersive, evocative pieces to date.

☆☆☆☆☆

If you’ve ever spent an extended amount of time out in the country, you’ll know the distinct difference between how it feels at sunrise and after sunset. Early in the morning, when the sun is drifting just enough above the horizon to reveal the dew left atop the pastures and make the wheat sparkle in the wind, there’s an unspoken sense of safety and comfort in it all; when you can hear and see all the life moving around you, it’s hard to feel anything but warmth. It’s when the darkness consumes those very same fields, when the rustling past the edge of the fence becomes too nondescript to tell whether it’s wind or a wildcat, when every creak of the porch steps seeming to have doubled in volume, that the magic of open land reveals its true duality. For the New England based quintet Old Saw, both of these feelings are essential to their music, their masterful 2021 debut Country Tropics somewhere between the memory, the dream and the reality of American folk music, reeling fiddle drones and soaring pedal steel creating gorgeous backdrops for spindly banjos and dark orchestral bells and blurry organs to duck in and out of, a vast expanse of ambient country built on the idea of calling out to the open country without forcing a particular vision of it. Their latest release does much of the same, but chooses the darkness rather than the sunrise for more intimate country laments with an extra layer of mystique, Sewn the Name’s six pieces leaving more space for silence and colder textures. It’s nowhere near as welcoming as their debut, but Sewn the Name pushes you into these quieter, lonelier environments to make you hunt for the beauty inside all the mess.

With this greater emphasis on decay comes an embrace of new recording techniques, tape machine manipulation done by pedal steel player Henry Birdsey giving these songs weight and an acute awareness of how they move through time. There’s heavy tape hiss and crackling in midsection highlight Ira Dorset Suffering From Moonblindness, the titular fiddle player’s whining drones wrapped around reversed 12-string guitar and bell recordings to keep you from getting a full understanding of the piece’s mechanics, and the absolutely spellbinding Spinner’s Weave lends different fidelity to each instrumental part, layers of fiddle covered in a fuzzy haze while Al Lakey’s intricate 12-string improvisations sit crystal clear on top like flashes of sunlight reflecting atop lake water. If Country Tropics let you drift through its pedal steel and soaring string lines, Sewn the Name forces you to confront its physical limitations as music - not one of these songs gets close to the ten minute mark outside of centerpiece Highgate Ledger, and it’s not just so they can fit more songs into the runtime, the heavy banjos and creaking fiddle lines dominating closing piece Bobcat Sarabande never heading to a big crescendo or crash into silence. Here, the edges are rougher, the textures more unvarnished, Old Saw burrowing into the roots of American folk music and reveling in how rugged yet timeless sound of these instruments puts their gentle ambient music in such a precarious position.

It’s beautiful all the same, which is largely why Sewn the Name still achieves such heights despite being a more reserved experience. While many other ambient albums have succeeded in holding their music in a single space or feeling (Irrlicht, Music for Airports), Sewn the Name traces different paths that all stem from the same country road: Brooksville Trestle Remains is distinctly eerie with its wandering guitar work and long pedal steel whines, while the previous Weathervaning uses rich fiddle layers and trickling banjo improvisation to reach for the homey warmth of old folk songs, tethered to the roots of their sound while seeking to pull unique moods out of every individual song. It can almost feel intimidating the first few listens, like the quintet are trying to pull you out of the Country Tropics’ sun-drenched warmth and trap you in the dusty wine cellar, but after settling into the album there’s a permeable sense of grief and devotion within these pieces not near as present in their debut. Music with this deep a connection to American folk history will always be in some part worshiping Appalachian country music, but Old Saw’s ambient pieces make listening to them feel especially tender, Bob Driftwood’s intricate banjo contributions in Highgate Ledger and Weathervaning easy to imagine being part of a live folk group and Dorset’s magical fiddle work in every piece beautiful enough to be in any country band, but in these grooveless expanses their dedication to the technique and feel of these instruments becomes meditative, becomes careful and focused on evoking the places this folk music comes from rather than just performing songs in a traditional country style. It’s a tricky task to pull off, but Old Saw’s willingness to play with the usual ambient elements - sound manipulation, tape machines, minimalist arrangement styles - places their songs right in the perfect sweet spot between ambient and country, utilizing the former’s generous stretches or space and the latter’s emotional sensitivity for some of the most powerful instrumental music this year. Sewn the Name may lie on the moonlit end of ambient country, but by trading the genre’s established norms for gloomy Americana dirges Old Saw unlock whole new dimensions to their sound. For them, ambient country can be as cold as it is familiar, soaring as it is trapped in the past; through their refraction of American folk music through the lens of modern experimental music, Old Saw’s music feels especially out of time, Sewn the Name leaving all the rough edges so you can fall in love with the memories the band is sharing. It can be a tough album to crack, but once you do there’s few other albums this year with such a robust vision and vivid storytelling. The floors might creak and the fields intimidate past sunset, but Sewn the Name makes exploring the darkness beautiful all the same.

[atomikats]

despite everything ‼️

[eriochromatic]

Not sure if I ever shared this panel redraw I did from last year

[marzipanandminutiae]

hello, internet user. before you is a selection of pictures you tagged "dark academia." you have 30 minutes to explain what each of them has to do with academia, defined by the Oxford dictionary as "the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship"

if you cannot complete this task a literature professor will enter the room and beat you into unconsciousness with a baseball bat that has the word "GOTHIC" printed on it in large letters

good luck

[darkrooklobby]

👁️🦉👁️

[jlphotography2022]

https://linktr.ee/lubec2023

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https://society6.com/lubec2022

[xxnotinmylobbyxx]

Those Nerdy Prudes…. they gotta go

[sykam0re]

Tableturf online will be real in 4 days

[spiderziege]

once upon a time, there was a player

[burntpancke]

i keep watching video essays and listening to people review one piece on yt and listening to people's reactions to water 7/ennies lobby is so fun for me i want to watch it for the first time again so badddd still the greatest op arc to this day imo 😮‍💨😮‍💨

[shima-draws]

THE SILLIES!!!!!!!