We listened to and loved Mike Gangloff's spellbinding April Is Passing earlier this year — and happily the Black Twig Picker / Pelt-er is back again with an absolutely terrific collab LP with English guitarist C Joynes, another Doom & Gloom favorite. Recorded beautifully by Bobby Lee in both studio and live settings, Tom Winter, Tom Spring is a perfect blend of the two players' singular styles and skills, using deep mountain music traditions as raw material to come up with something as fresh as the morning dew. Joynes' crisp tone provides a sweet counterpoint to Gangloff's dronier mindset on fiddle, some tunes flying by in the blink of an eye, others stretching out into an eternal, dreamlike zone. You could call it "avant-folk," but that sounds too chin-scratch-y for my liking; Tom Winter, Tom Spring feels joyous and spontaneous, two musicians finding fertile common ground and seeing what they can grow together.
Mike Gangloff and C Joynes—Tom Winter, Tom Spring (Sonido Polifonico)
During a tour of the UK last year, these two masters of traditional and experimental music sat down for an afternoon to record this ep. Mike Gangloff plays hardanger fiddle and jawharp, and C Joynes plays acoustic and electric guitar. The title Tom Winter, Tom Spring perhaps refers to a 19th-century British boxer who changed his name from the former to the latter.
Brief opener “Rapid City” (based on one of Joynes’s compositions) shows how well the duo work together as Joynes’s powerful fingerpicking blends with Gangloff’s driving jawharp. The equally concise “West Cavaliers” (which appeared on Joynes’s God Feeds the Ravens) combines more British-sounding guitar work with Appalachia-via-Norway fiddling. The sprightly take on the traditional fiddle tune “Sail Away Ladies,” a staple of Gangloff’s Black Twig Pickers, is sure to set toes tapping. More experimental are “Two Bishops,” with menacing drones bowing and nervous guitar runs bathed in effects, and “Witch Marks,” which takes up half of the running time of the ep. The latter resembles a cross between Gangloff’s work with Pelt and something from Joynes’s Borametz Tree, a psychedelic excursion from New Weird Britain to Old Weird Americana and back.
Though there doesn’t seem to have been a whole lot of overdubbing, this duo sounds like a full band. The limited instrumental palate is used to exquisite effect, and the improvisation is inspired. Here’s hoping that Gangloff and Joynes reconvene for more shows and recordings.
Nick Jonah Davis lives in Derbyshire, England, which is a place where evidence of older editions of England is always easy to find. Successive eras likewise coincide in his music. Davis plays acoustic and electric guitars, drawing on both American and English folk and instrumental traditions. He has worked with like-minded folk, such as C. Joynes and Sharron Kraus, and is also an established guitar teacher and provider of therapeutic musical interventions. He’s been recording the occasional solo record since 2009, and in 2016, Dusted’s Bill Meyer had this to say about House of Dragons: “the Nottingham-based guitarist isn’t living in bifurcations of the past, and he isn’t asking us to either. Rather, he invites the listener into a world bounded by the resonance of his tunings and the vividness of his evolving melodies.” Thread Recordings is about to release a swell new LP, When the Sun Came, and Davis has compiled a list of sounds made by some of his favorite associates.
Even for solo guitarists, music is a collaborative, social thing. For this list I’ve picked some music by artists that I’ve collaborated, recorded or gigged with over the last decade or so. Members of the NJD home team.
Kogumaza — “Ursids”
WAAT048 Split 7" w/Hookworms by Kogumaza
When I lived in Nottingham, Kogumaza were my favorite band in town. They play deep, droning riff-based cosmic guitar music which draws on their backgrounds playing with local heroes like Lords, Rattle and Bob Tilton. They’ve also done their homework, having sat in with heavy hitters like Glenn Branca, Damo Suzuki and Boredoms. This tune was recorded in Nottingham, with Nathan Bell of Lungfish sitting in on bass. I was the assistant engineer on this session, and remember getting a pleasing headful of Katy Brown’s kick drum as we set up the mics. Mind-manifesting stuff.
Ex-Easter Island Head — “Large Electric Ensemble Third Movement”
Large Electric Ensemble by Ex-Easter Island Head
Liverpool’s Ex-Easter Island Head are a revelation. They repurpose electric guitars through a variety of extended techniques, with unprecedented, nourishing results. I was lucky enough to play a couple of shows as a member of their Large Electric Ensemble, a 12-guitar band powered by 1 drummer and multiple Arts Council pizzas. I learned a lot from them in terms of playing guitar with craftily-deployed allen keys and bolts. Living proof that people can and do make genuinely beautiful, ground-breaking music without being all precious and up themselves about it. Good lads.
C Joynes and the Furlong Bray — “Sang Kancil”
The Borametz Tree by C Joynes & The Furlong Bray
Joynes and I have been fellow travelers in the solo guitar realm for many years now. We’ve probably seen more of each other’s gigs than anyone else alive. I was really pleased to be invited into the making of the Borametz Tree album. Not exactly sure how you’d describe my role on that project, but it involved some bass playing, some refereeing and, in the case of this piece, heading into my cellar with Nathan Mann to process some sounds through my echo units. I really love this bizarre, swirling piece of music. It defies description and I really can’t see how it could have happened under any circumstances. Power to the Furlong Bray.
Jim Ghedi — “Bramley Moor”
A Hymn For Ancient Land by Jim Ghedi
Jim popped up a few years ago, around the same time as Toby Hay, and has been a sure source of decent sounds ever since. Jim’s initial, masterful solo guitar work has bloomed out into an exploration of both traditional folk and his own songwriting. Having sat right next to him when we played together in my village a couple of years ago, I can confirm that he has a huge, resonant chest voice. Luckily, he always commits to his guitar just as fully, as you can hear on this jaunty instrumental on which I played some weissenborn. Nathan Mann pops up again playing percussion on this one, small world…
Cath and Phil Tyler — “King Henry”
The Ox and the Ax by Cath and Phil Tyler
I first met Cath and Phil at the legendary Sin Eater festival, a 3-day weekend of fine underground music and excellent ale at an isolated pub in Shropshire. Almost everyone on this list played there actually. This is folk music as it should be played, plain and flinty with a complete focus on the song. Understatement goes a long way in this music and, I suspect because of this, Phil is one of the most criminally under-rated guitarists around. There’s a little part of me that lives for Cath’s jaw harp break at the end of this one.
Toby Hay — “Now in a Minute”
New Music For The 12 String Guitar by Toby Hay
Toby has a special place in my heart for lining me up an annual show in a cafe at the wonderful Green Man festival for the past several years, meaning my family could go for free. Here’s a near-perfect example of a miniature acoustic study from his album New Music for the 12 String Guitar. The guitar in question was custom-built for Toby by Roger Bucknall of Fylde guitars. Fylde put out the word that a label was looking for a young guitarist to make a record on a custom-built Fylde that they would commission, and I immediately suggested Toby. He rose to the occasion. Reckon he owes me a handmade guitar though; I’ll give him a nudge one of these days.
The Horse Loom — “Silver Ribbon”
The Horse Loom by The Horse Loom
Steve Malley played in post-punk bands back in the day, gigging alongside the likes of Fugazi. He later picked up a Fylde guitar and went down an acoustic rabbit hole where his love of British folk and flamenco come to the fore. The DIY-or-die roots of his playing flash an occasional fin. After we met I persuaded him to come down to Nottingham and let me record his first album in First Love studio. He did the whole thing in a day and it’s awesome. This is my favorite instrumental from that collection.
Sharron Kraus — “Sorrow’s Arrow”
Joy's Reflection is Sorrow by Sharron Kraus
I started playing shows with Sharron as we were both UK artists on the Tompkins Square label at the time, so it kind of made sense. She’s a bit of an institution in psych-folk circles and eventually I began playing on her records and at live shows, which has been a real joy. This tune features some heavy drones and an occasional splish of my lap steel. It’s classic Kraus — mournful, insightful, immersive. If you want to hear someone with a bigger brain than yours talking about the weirder side of life, check out her Preternatural Investigations podcast.
Haress — “Wind the Bobbin”
Haress by HARESS
Haress is centered around the twin electric guitar work of Liz Still and David Hand. Located in downright gorgeous rural Shropshire, they ran the Sin Eater Festival and still put out essential music on Lancashire and Somerset Records. I reckon they’ve helped me out more than anyone over the years, releasing House of Dragons on vinyl and always setting me up a show when I need one. This gorgeous piece features Nathan Bell again, this time on trumpet. Those Nathans do get around.
Burd Ellen — “Chi-Mi-Bhuam”
Chi Mi Bhuam by Burd Ellen
I first saw Debbie Armour singing with Alasdair Roberts, a good start. When I went up to play in Glasgow in 2018, I asked if she’d like to open up my show at the Glad Café, which she did, alone except for a borrowed harmonium. I was mesmerized, I think everyone was. Too good for a support slot. Here’s a Gaelic vocal piece which demonstrates exactly who we’re dealing with here, a profoundly talented and committed artist with a lifelong immersion in traditional music, using it as a springboard into something entirely her own.
Hopefully you didn’t blow your Bandcamp budget last Friday — because you’re going to want this LP as well. A killer collab between C Joynes (electric guitar), dbh (violin), Andrew Cheetham (drums) and Gavin Clarke (bass), The Great Mountain is packed with exciting instrumental excursions, heavy minor key modalities and telepathic interplay. Fans of the Dirty Three will approve. Joynes and dbh are in perfect alignment throughout, complemented by the dirge-y but still alert playing from Cheetham and Clarke. Things are generally dark and ominous, but a little sunlight breaks through from time to time, especially on the joyous closer “The Eastern Side of Walantar,” which sounds like a train about to (happily) jump its track.
There are occasional bursts of thrilling electric guitar on C Joynes’ latest LP, but the overall vibe is decidedly pre-rock-and-roll. Scratch that, The Borametz Tree is decidedly pre-Christian. The wild, ecstatic music he and his cohorts make here would make for the perfect accompaniment to some kinda summer solstice celebration on the British isles before the Romans arrived. Droning fiddles, martial rhythms, stinging strings ... it’s absolutely great stuff in the vein of Third Ear Band or some of the more intense Early Music Consort of London jams. And “Gottem ni Gottem” may well be the most beautiful tune you’ll hear this year, with banjo and fiddle conjuring up a gorgeous sunset of sound. This is Britfolk that isn’t fussy or overly scholarly, using age-old ingredients to create something totally fresh. Get it!
C. Joynes & Nick Jonah Davis: Split Electric (Thread Recordings)
Originally published at North Country Primitive in January 2016
Split Electric is what you get when you let two of the UK’s most consistently invigorating acoustic guitarists not only pick up electric guitars, but also smash their heads repeatedly against a whopping great vintage plate reverb with the inevitable outcome. Thread Records, this happened on your watch and you should hang your heads in shame – you’ve unleashed a monster.
Although, as the title suggests, this is a split release rather than a collaborative effort, Joynes and Davis’ approaches to the electric guitar seem to almost intuitively complement each other. There is little, if anything, in the way of untoward jarring as we switch back and forth between the two of them over the course of the album. In fact, it sounds very much like the process of making Split Electric involved them dreaming up a shared set of aesthetic principles to guide their direction of travel. Either that, or there’s some weird psychic energy coursing along the leyline between Nottingham and Cambridge.
Electrification has not distracted either contributor from their customary craftsmanship, economy of style or general absence of palaver. In the hands of lesser players, this album could have quickly descended into a morass of bombast or noodling: with Joynes and Davis it is absolutely clear that any early warning signs of the onset of fretwankery would have had them seeking urgent medical and spiritual attention. Having said that, both musicians make excellent use of the opportunities afforded to them by amplification: there’s plenty of buzzing and humming and an admirable deployment of sustain and distortion – but never so much that the musical intent is overwhelmed or diminished. Electricity is the medium, not the message: the temptation to fill every space with sound is doggedly resisted. Put simply, they both understand the importance of giving this music room to breathe.
In noting the aesthetic congruence on display, I’m not for a moment suggesting that the contributions of the two player are interchangeable. Not at all - each of them brings their already honed individual take on acoustic playing to the table. During what could rather grandiosely be described as a blind tasting, the only piece that gave pause was Davis’ Corksniffer’s Delight, which I momentarily attributed to Joynes, blindsided as I was by the growl and raunch on offer. For, at the risk of overstating the case - and with the proviso that any generalisation is duty-bound to be riddled with holes - Joynes is responsible for the earthier contributions, directly channelling folk and country blues traditions - and on Endomorph Vs Ectomorph even going so far as to consort with the spectres of Pussy Galore and the Blues Explosion. Davis, on the other hand, leans towards a kind of backwoods psychedelia, with a gossamer touch of light and frost. He has a skittering grace that neatly counterpoints Joynes’ throatier chug.
The very strong brace of openers confirms this theory. Joynes’ The Running Board toys with rockabilly swagger - it lets you know it’s up for a good time, but that you probably shouldn’t do anything to get on its wrong side. In fact, it comes on for all the world like a musically more articulate Billy Childish. Meanwhile, Davis’ Poa Kichizi conjures up winter sunshine - crisp guitar figures leavened by warm distortion. It is shot through with the same wistfulness that characterises the more bucolic outpourings of the Canterbury Scene: you wouldn’t be surprised if Robert Wyatt fronted up half way through with melancholy vocal.
Frankly, there’s not a duff track on the entire album. Between them, the two guitarists summon up a heady stew of references - from the weird, old America, to Trumpton, to the British folk rock surge of the 70s - and Bold William Taylor is crying out for Joynes to collaborate with drummer Alex Neilson. I’m not even going to try to make a case for whose contributions I favour more - this album truly is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. If pressed, however, this week’s top picks have to be Davis’ aforementioned Corksniffer’s Delight, where a heavy psychedelic boogie lurks just around the corner, and Joynes’ Whittlesey Straw Bear Tune, where a well known English folk theme is morphed into John Fahey channelling Tales From The Riverbank for the benefit of a pissed-up Cossack dance troupe.
C. Joynes and Nick Jonah Davis are playing in Manchester tomorrow night. In time honoured tradition, some wag is bound to shout “Judas” within minutes of one or the other of them plugging in. To which the only possible response can be “I don’t believe you.”
Split Electric is available on vinyl or download from Thread Recordings
Cambridge, UK guitarist C Joynes is conversant with English folk tunes, North and West African music, the European classical tradition and its mutant minimalist offshoot, and various improvisational folkways. Better yet, Joynes has a gift for organically incorporating his various influences into beguiling and haunting melodies. He has released seven albums to date, and his most recent, The Borametz Tree, was released on Thread Recordings in the UK and Feeding Tube Records in the US. The Borametz Tree was recorded with The Furlong Bray, an ad hoc band comprising members of experimental folk ensemble Dead Rat Orchestra, plus electroacoustic composer Cam Deas and fellow guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Nick Jonah Davis. Isaac Olson, in his review, called it, “a wholly convincing invisible city and utopian alternative musical history of the world, something warm and joyful out of the long ages.”
Joynes lists down a handful of the elements that have contributed to this multi-layered project.
Ali Farka Toure—Ali Toure Farka
In some ways, the alpha and omega of guitar music. Hard to choose one album but anything from his earliest recordings, released on Radio Mali or on the ‘red’ and ‘green’ albums, is going to be pretty much essential. However, I’ve dropped this one in here for its gentler, rolling, slightly distant feel.
Jorge Luis Borges—Collected Fictions
Borges’ short stories are among the most concise, densely-written and downright entertaining literature ever written, with each one opening up an infinite field of possible realities through a hotchpotch of fantasy, mythology, fake academia, ethno-forgery, philosophical murder mysteries and shaggy-dog stories. Basically, a how-to manual for growing your own worlds.
Violeta Parra—Composiciones Para Guitarra
Violeta Parra was a songwriter, folklorist, poet and political activist from Chile, whose recordings were first introduced to me few years ago by the film-maker Harry Wheeler. Right from the outset, I was struck by her unique and idiosyncratic compositions for solo guitar, which are still pretty much unlike anything else I’ve heard before or since.
Edward W. Said—Orientalism (1978)
Pretty much the ur-text for starting to think about the ways in which Western cultures have regarded others in relation to themselves, and the implications that holds for how we now interact with or absorb music, art and literature from other parts of the world. Sounds like a daunting topic, but it’s hugely readable and kind of essential for anyone interested in engaging with the world at large.
Sun City Girls—330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda
The secret history of the Sun City Girls as underground legends, fourth-world pioneers, ethnomusical experimentalists, performance artists, post-modern pranksters, X-ray bullshit detectors and anti-everything provocateurs is now pretty well documented across the internet. I don’t get on with everything they do and some of it makes me downright uncomfortable, but that’s probably at least one objective for their activities—to challenge and confound. There may be something for everyone, but there’s no-one for everything... However, if I can choose one record that captures all that is best about the possibilities they offer, then it would be this sprawling unwieldy fragmentary world-gobbling collection.
Various—Gamelan of Java Vol 1: Kraton Kasunanan (Lyrichord 7456)
Listen here
Of the many many recordings of traditional Gamelan that are available, the best seem to blur the boundaries between musical performance, live event, environmental recording and sound art. Of all recordings of Gamelan that I’ve heard, this particular one is a long-standing favorite.
Edwin Prevost—No Sound Is Innocent (1995)
Entertaining, opinionated and provocative collection of essays from Eddie Prevost, founder member of pioneering improvising group AMM among other things. His basic thesis is that, rather being ‘above politics’, any musical sound that we listen to—whether in performance or on record—is loaded with pre-conceived messages and cultural assumptions. This book is not written to be agreed with, but it is good at encouraging you to think again about what you listen to and why you do so…
Eritrean Wedding Music
I was lucky enough to work in Eritrea for a few years on and off and spent a lot of time at weekends wandering around Asmara looking for weddings to invite myself into. Most social music seems to involve a perfect and minimal assemblage of traditional and modern elements: here we’ve got a distorted drum machine, the electrified Krar, a mutual partnership between audience and performer, extended durations and that loping driving beat.
Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars listen to Sublime Frequencies—eds. Michael E. Veal & E. Tammy Kim (2016)
Tying back to Sun City Girls, this book is a scrappy collection of academic essays and interviews exploring Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies, founded in 2003 by Alan and Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, and famous for releasing high-quality collections of ‘unknown’ music from around the world. A big debate about whether modern labels and download sites works to liberate global music from studious academia and worthy ‘World Music’ tags, or whether their approach is only serving up cultural stereotypes for a Western post-punk hipster audience. Some of the pieces are a bit dry, but there’s a lot of chippy to-and-fro between the academics and the musicians over issues like cultural appropriation and intellectual property. It’s also kind of entertaining how personally everyone seems to start taking it...
Omar Khorshid
Omar Khorshid was an Egyptian guitarist and film star who recorded a bunch of stuff in the ‘70s, and was hugely popular in Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey. Most of his recordings have got this super-modern maximalist approach to production, using loads of effects, synths and electronic sounds—I guess you could draw some parallels with the experimental dub producers from around the same time. While rooted in traditional instrumental music, the results are unashamedly exotic and sound like a technicolour sci-fi surf music.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Pretty much any footage from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his ensemble seems to work as a testament for the extraordinary heights that group improvisation can reach. Here you can read the exchanges between the vocalists and the instrumentalists as a kind of benign ecstatic duelling, each goading the other on to greater levels.
Michael Denning—Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2016)
This great book maps out the hidden history of global popular music, based on recording sessions made in the 1920s by major labels around the world. These sessions first captured on record many previously undocumented forms of popular music—jazz, samba, rebetika, flamenco, kroncong - as distinct from traditional or classical music. The recordings were then circulated around the world via shipping routes, leading to new hybrid forms of music and explaining, for example, the popularity of country music in West Africa or the presence of Hawaiian guitar in Bollywood film music. A great book for restoring faith in the natural process of musical exchange and cross-fertilisation.
C Joynes & The Furlong Bray— The Borametz Tree (Thread Recordings)
Gamelan, Chinese opera, Morris tunes, South Asian percussion, Sahel guitar, pre-war blues, and Scotch/Irish dance tunes and their scruffy Appalachian descendants are just a few of the sounds haunting The Borametz Tree, the new record from Cambridge guitarist C Joynes and his ad hoc band, The Furlong Bray. Plenty of well-meaning heads take the ecumenical approach, but what makes The Borametz Tree special, besides its melodic facility, is that (with one exception) Joynes & Co. have zero interest in empty genre exercises, authenticity, or bragging about the size of their record collections. Rather, they’ve created an evocative, playful, sui generis sonic world where their imaginations run rampant and yours is invited to do the same.
Most pieces on The Borametz Tree indulge in music’s higher purposes: to amuse, inspire, and comfort yourself and your neighbors. Put it another way—it’s folk music; it just so happens to be from somewhere you won’t find on any map. It would be a blast to dance with your dearly beloved to the fifes and electric guitar of “Hamasien Wedding Song”, while on the crepuscular “Gottem Ni Gottem” you can almost hear the musicians looking at each other from across the porch, smiling and trying to get their timing right. The wiry exchanges of “Tango Wire 334” and the Eurasian-pagan stomp of “The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary” beg to be described by archaic words like badinage, charivari, and rodomontade, while standout opener “Triennale” is, among other things, Jakarta juke joint Buddhist boogie. Perhaps best of all is the stirring finale, “Mali Sajyo”, which rides the cyclical swells of gospel or marching songs, of “There Is A Happy Land” and “Bread and Roses”. Like the nearly forgotten city-state of Hav, (colonized by Russia, Turkey, Britain, Italy, France, Greece, Armenia, China, and a handful of Arab countries) The Borametz Tree is redolent of a dozen cultures and not easily identifiable with any of them.
Which brings us to the album’s big misstep. Unlike the best tunes here, “Librarie Du Maghreb” tells you everything upfront. The Furlong Bray includes members of the wonderfully named Dead Rat Orchestra, who make their living, in part, from creating music for BBC history documentaries. Honorable work, but the one-dimensional Saharan signage of “Librarie Du Maghreb”, even with its strange distortions and half-heard vocals, is incidental music, soundtrack work. Too, “Jacket Shines” is, by itself, a lovely piece of post-Pelt rural drone, particularly when the banjo and fiddle interpolate some sprightly airs, but it doesn’t fit with the surprising, ramshackle vibe of the other numbers. On both tracks, you know where you’re going long before you get there. Prune them from The Borametz Tree and you’ve got yourself a veritable Anthology of Aghartan Folk Music.
Of course, the aforementioned syncretic city-state of Hav never existed. It was the invention of travel writer Jan Morris, one so credible that she reportedly fielded questions from confused would-be travelers and a member of the Royal Geographical Society about its location. Similarly, C Joynes and the Furlong Bray have dreamed up a wholly convincing invisible city and utopian alternative musical history of the world. While the beleaguered Havians “do not excel at the musical art”, the Bray boys do, and have created something warm and joyful out of the long ages.
