Easy musical comparisons fail. The tendency towards whisper, the mostly bare canvas, the sparse guitar, banjo. The breathy, unstained vocals. Think instead of a rare and fragile gift: a glass figurine, maybe fine jewelry…

Arborea is husband-and-wife team Buck and Shanti Curran, from Maine. In a recent interview, reprinted here, Buck tells of the project beginnings in the summer of 2005, when he bought Shanti a banjo for her birthday. This brief, unadorned statement is the perfect complement to Arborea and its music: innocent, plain-talking, and vibrant. Their subsequent level of output has been brisk: three albums and two appearances on compilations, with critical acclaim from NPR, BBC, and The Wire. Not half-bad for a wistful voice, a sometimes imperceptible guitar, and a banjo. The inclinations toward one-take recordings, the focus on improvisation. There are no drums here, no 11-piece live ensemble.

April 26 saw the release of their latest release, titled Red Planet; don’t mistake the title for any sort of reference to space or space rock: this is as earthy as anything you will hear in 2011. The final stages of album production were funded in part by a Kickstarter.com campaign, which is a fascinating read in its own right. (We learn for example that Buck and Shanti’s two children are home-schooled, even while on tour: another testament to their alt-folk method.)

The Kickstarter message tenders “Careless Love,” which is an excellent introduction to the delicateness and precision of the ten tracks that make up Red Planet. A single, dancing folk guitar line accompanies Shanti’s reflective, erotic, and near-murmured vocals: “Couldn’t keep you from my door/when I wore my apron low.” Careless love, indeed. Later in the track she notices: “Now I wear my apron high/scarce I see you passing by.” The song is brief, weighing in at under three minutes, but carries a terrific force. “Spain” begins with a mournful and chiming guitar line, and Shanti’s vocals are bolder here, perhaps a bit warmer in mix: “Catch a boat to Spain/the mountains there will call your name.” Helena Espvall (Espers) contributes an aching cello performance, introduced after the first, slow verse. Espvall also performs on “Arms and Horses,” a frontier-tinted composition of banjo, electric guitar, and ethereal vocals: probably the strongest track on the album. Four minutes of canter break into an uptempo gold rush of cascading cello, reverberant guitar, and hypnotic banjo.

Arborea nod to a key influence with “Phantasmagoria in Two,” a stripped-bare refurbishing of Tim Buckley’s piercing, timeless, and psychedelic classic. What the Arborea cover gives away in momentum, in regains in texture: raw banjo harmonics, the barroom guitar wizardry. The original is scarcely recognizable here: Buck and Shanti have delivered a true remake. The title song “Red Planet” serves a brief and heated drone prologue to the nine-minute hushed epic “Wolves,” which begins as a stark hammered dulcimer and voice performance. Moments of strings and hints of vocal harmonies are scattered throughout the first six minutes, until Buck’s distorted guitar joins in for a restrained coda.

If anything, Red Planet moves Arborea’s catalog more toward silence than away from it. This is an album of moods, stories, and cautions, not of hooks and volume. CD and MP3 formats are available now from Strange Attractors. LP release date is May 17.

- Review by Fred Nolan for Fluid Radio

Photo taken by Buck Curran

www.arboreamusic.blogspot.com
www.strange-attractors.com

Of the players involved in the recent resurgence of fingerstyle guitar, Harris Newman has established himself as a primary envoy on the modern day steel-stringer shortlist.

As with the case of his brothers-in-arms Jack Rose, Glenn Jones and Steffen Basho-Junghans, each of whom borrow from the past traditions of mavericks Fahey, Basho et al but have re-invented the sound and style with fresh perspectives, Newman distinguishes his music even further with a very idiosyncratic sound.

A fixture in the Montreal scene for years, Newman cut his teeth early on by playing bass in Constellation recording artists Sackville. Currently he is ½ of the duo Triple Burner with cohort Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), and can be found on records by Montreal bands Hrsta and Esmerine. Newman also happens to be the mastering agent du jour for the Montreal scene, bringing sparkle to recordings as diverse as Wolf Parade, A Silver Mt Zion, Fly Pan Am and Carla Bozulich. Its speculation to claim that the post-modern rock sound which has come to define the Montreal scene guides Newman’s approach to the acoustic guitar, but it is a resolute certainty that Newman is charting terrain that sounds like few others. Following up the critically acclaimed Accidents With Nature And Each Other (Strange Attractors, 2005), Newman unveils his third album Decorated, yet another beautiful, forward-thinking take on the steel-string sound.

In contrast to the name of the album, Harris Newman opts for a somewhat stripped-down, almost minimalist approach to Decorated. Subtle and introspective, the first half of the album showcases Newman’s brand of solo acoustic guitar. Mood and color take precedence, as Newman’s fingerpicking weaves tonal spirals across each composition. Melodies bob and weave from alternate pacing, balanced between space and sound like strands of tinsel clinging to a tree. Marking a stylistic turning point in the album, “Blues for Vilhelm” is a humming incantation for lapsteel guitar, a minimalist sound pool rippling ever outwards. Following with the languid improvisation “Golden Valleys as Seen From the East”, Newman stretches out and explores intoxicating themes, coaxing out melodies which quickly blossom and decay in slowly unfurling spools. Newman picks up the electric guitar with “Thee Opera House Stomp”, and backed by the forward momentum of drummer Eric Craven, the song embarks from a country-blues riff headlong into serpentine trajectory reminiscent of the arty twang of Gastr del Sol.

Extracting elements of folk and blues and exposing it bare, Harris Newman dresses up his music in cinematic, “post-rock” attire. Decorated is accessible solo guitar music for the experimentally minded, a meditative electro-acoustic melding of Leo Kottke and Jim O’Rourke, illustrating why Newman’s own take on the tradition sets him apart from the pack. – Strange Attractors

Purchase here

www.strange-attractors.com

www.harrisnewman.com