The songs flow right into each other and are only composed of what seems to be a few layers each, but there is a fond fuzziness to them, that glistens like the light reflected off the water. There is a slight melancholy tinge to the music, but it’s not overpowering.
Everything else going on in the world disappears for a time
Ambient folk artist Black Brunswicker paints a pastoral drift down a slow river, a winding lullaby that floats down the meandering Sunflower River, a tributary to the Yazoo River with guitar, field recordings, and light electronics. The Yazoo in turn flows into the veins of Americas dividing artery, the Mississippi, before emptying itself into the Gulf of Mexico (yes, of Mexico).
The Sunflower River itself sits inside a channel that Mississippi carved out in long ago years. The brackish muddy water moves between farms, neighborhoods, wetlands, and the abandoned shacks where sharecroppers lived out their years. The river starts just below the border of Tennessee before it snakes its one hundred mile way into the Yazoo.
Along the way, at Clarksdale, the county seat of Coahoma County, they hold the annual Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival. There is no Gospel music here unless you call it the gospel of drone, the gospel of sweet ambiance. The Delta Blues, however, can be heard on this record, but slowed down and refracted through a gaussian lens. This is a perfect addition to Nettwerk’s growing catalog of “shoe gauze” music as heard in the solo music of label mate Hollie Kenniff.
Sometimes you have to leave a place too, in order to recreate that place in your art. Such is the case with Black Brunswicker, the ambient folk project of Etta Helfrich. She makes her home now in Manchester, UK, but comes from Bloomington, Indiana. The rivers of the Midwest have much in common with those further south. They are all flowing towards the Mississippi and they are often muddy waters. More muddy than rippling and clear, but no less inviting on a hot summer day. In the music there is a similar cloudiness.
There is a slight melancholy tinge to the music ::
No drums, no voices, just warbling instrumentals recalling the first highways of America that can only be navigated by boat. The fingerpicking here is placid, impressionistic, with lingering pastel synth pads adding to the shimmer. The songs flow right into each other and are only composed of what seems to be a few layers each, but there is a fond fuzziness to them, that glistens like the light reflected off the water. There is a slight melancholy tinge to the music, but it’s not overpowering.
This music is akin to floating down such a river in a black rubber tube. Soft field recordings chirp and buzz, the hum of insects and birds along languid drifts as gentle picking brings the mind and heart into a relaxed center. Everything else going on in the world disappears for a time. Problems go away. Time is blurred until there is only the sun and the sound of the water as it hits a shallow place bubbling over rocks, as it moves back into a deeper channel before stopping for a time on a sandbar where a fire can be made to heat up whatever lunch was brought along (hot dogs on sticks were what my dad and I ate on our canoe trips in eastern Indiana).
Somewhere along the way there will be a rope swing and time to swim. This is music of full summer and the grains of distortion on the guitar strings are like sheens of haze on a humid afternoon.
Dreams of a Sunflower River is available on Nettwerk. [Bandcamp]
