8:30pm. $18 ADV / $20 DOS.
Magic Tuber Stringband, hailing from North Carolina, probes the undercurrents of the landscapes around them. Highly skilled players and writers, the trio are leaders within the burgeoning avant composition world utilizing folk instrumentation. Their music appears to weave in and out of the fabric of their surroundings, reflecting their time spent living across the Southeast and studying its regional folk traditions and natural histories. Having performed recently at Big Ears, Hopscotch, Sound & Gravity (and many other places along the way) the group’s music resonates well beyond their regional roots.Their newest record, Heavy Water, will be out May 22 on the venerable Thrill Jockey Records. The ensemble continues to stretch the parameters of acoustic instrumental expression with masterful flourishes of dense, textural arrangements, subtle minimalist gestures and deft improvisation.
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Heavy Water addresses the toll of a nuclear arms plant on the local landscape and the communities that once lived there. It is a musical evocation of destruction and resilience–an embrace of dissonance and tension with moments of transcendence.
The inspiration for Heavy Water is rooted in fiddler Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on the Savannah River Site in rural South Carolina, and the effects of military arms production on both the local ecosystems and the people that subsisted on them. Werner explains:
“The town of Ellenton, South Carolina was the largest of the towns displaced in 1952 by the U.S. federal government to build the Savannah River Plant, which produced radioactive materials for U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The former site of Ellenton was dedicated to the extraction of heavy water while other areas of the plant focused on manufacturing weapons-grade plutonium and tritium within nuclear reactors. Heavy water is chemically altered to be denser than normal water and is incredibly expensive and time-consuming to produce, requiring 52 gallons of river water for one fluid ounce. The process was fueled by a coal combustion powerhouse, and now the river floodplain adjacent to the remnants of Ellenton is covered by a plume of toxic coal ash.”
The pieces of Heavy Water pay tribute to the loss of community and untold ecological fallout that comes with such invasive, disruptive legacies of production. A verdant countryside often mythologized in American vernacular as a respite or refuge will see the deep impact those legacies have wrought for decades to come, a dynamic that seeps its way into the music’s buzz. “Appalachia and the rural South are often caught up with a cliché, whimsical desire to ‘return’ to ‘better’ times – simpler, more wholesome, relaxing, quaint,” Werner continues. “We are interested in the degradation and exploitation that permeates these landscapes and is smoothed over or repackaged in a palatable way in the preservation of their folk traditions. We felt the loss of the people whose livelihoods had been connected to the land and who were forcibly removed. Now the land is contaminated to the extent that the possibility of a lasting, personal relationship with it–through growing food, collecting clean water, building a home–is severed.”
Heavy Water marks Magic Tuber Stringband’s first recording as the trio of fiddler/field recordist Werner, guitarist/organist Evan Morgan, and bassist/banjoist Mike DeVito. With the aid of field recordings by Jasper Lee and tape manipulation by Oliver Child-Lanning, the trio employ an entire ecosystem of sounds, from tender, reverent melodies to bristling harmonics to embellished soundscapes taken directly from the environment. “Sound of a Million Stars” takes its name from Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa’s short film about fallout from Fukushima and invokes chaos and damage, a maximalist cacophony inspired by Avant-explorers like SUMAC. “Woodpeckers” features a chilling back-and-forth between paramilitary exercise machine gun fire and woodpeckers of the Savannah River Site tapping out mimicking rhythms, the latter exercising their instinctual desire to protect their home. The gorgeous “Where the Place Becomes Forgetting” layers a counterpoint of steady, round-like guitar and banjo riffing with fraught fiddle swoops and the sounds of a pond teeming with wildlife, yet bound within the shadow of the nuclear plant.
The movements of Heavy Water reflect a changing landscape. Across meditations on loss and regrowth, of desolation and recovery, moments of serenity are belied by unease. The trio’s integration of more abrasive timbres and a distinct use of space into their sound give their improvisations more time to breathe and explore dense collages of feeling. Heavy Water is more than a collection of songs. It is a work whose compositions are entirely modern, played on traditionally folk acoustic instruments. In the trio’s practiced hands, the pieces defy expectations and emotionally address the pain and defiant perseverance of the lives–human, flora or fauna–irrevocably changed by dominant forces. It is a powerful musical statement by some of the brightest young players composing at the intersection between traditional instrumentation and avant composition.
