Lauded folk trio Magic Tuber Stringband has announced the new album Heavy Water, out May 22nd. Heavy Water pays tribute to the loss of community and untold ecological fallout that comes with invasive, disruptive legacies of nuclear production in rural landscapes. Along with the album’s announcement, the trio have shared the single “Tribute to the Angels,” lush with ebullient flourishes of vibrant melodies and spaciousness.
On the piece, the band elaborates:
“The title of this piece comes from that of a poem by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), written during World War II. It’s part of her Trilogy series in which she revisits the ‘old gods’ and the shards of myth, divinity, and humanity that manage to persist through wartime and fascism. Tribute to the Angels includes a description of an apparition of the Virgin Mary to the poet and her two friends within a dream.
“The beginning contains fragments of old time tunes (Farewell Trion, Miller Boy) played high up on the neck of the fiddle to bring in harmonics and make it feel lighter and ethereal.”
Magic Tuber Stringband 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. The ensemble continues to stretch the parameters of acoustic instrumental expression with masterful flourishes of dense, textural arrangements, subtle minimalist gestures and deft improvisation. 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.”
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.
Magic Tuber Stringband plan to tour throughout the US this Spring, with dates to be announced soon. The band have been regular performers at Hopscotch Music Festival and recently toured alongside Michael Nau, as well as made appearances at the first ever Sound & Gravity Festival in Chicago, and Bandaloop. Werner is a recent recipient of the prestigious Hambidge Residency.
