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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.

Isaac Olson

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