Daniel Bachman - The Morning Star

The Quietus

One of the most captivating hallmarks of the subgenre of folk guitar known as 'American primitive' is the fact that it looks so far beyond the pastoral, the Romantic, the historical and the traditional to conjure its special fizzing energy, as defined by its greatest proponents from John Fahey and Robbie Basho through to more recent candle holders Sir Richard Bishop or William Tyler.

Fredericksburg, Virginia's Daniel Bachman has undertaken a journey in recent years further and further down this path. His 2016 album River found him sliding and picking in a manner that recalled his late, great Three Lobed Recordings labelmate Jack Rose, or even the canonical works of a Jansch, Renbourn, or Graham. Pretty, mournful and a little nostalgic, Bachman's open tunings and rhythmic playing technique made his music altogether very lovely and pleasantly familiar. His self-titled album of the same year, however, saw an expansiveness creeping into his music that manifested itself through the rich, ominous drone of 'Brightleaf Blues I' and 'Brightleaf Blues II'. His devotion to a grinding, slower approach, one that incorporates many ideas beyond just the acoustic guitar, has culminated in this 75-minute double album The Morning Star, by far Bachman's most abstract, speculative and ambitious work to date.

Eighteen-minute opener 'Invocation', for example, is a concoction of chimes, snatched radio recordings, white noise and industrial-sounding shards of noise that eventually leads to a drone created by a combination of Forrest Marquisee's fiddle and Ian McColm's harmonium, with Bachman's guitar reduced to drowned-out improvised inflections over the top. It is an uncompromising triumph of sound assemblage, and the aesthetic returns as the album wears on. 'Car' is a guitarless piece made up of a one-note organ tone and badly received AM radio recordings, conveying certain undertones of urban dystopia in its confluence of sonic ephemera.

Field recordings and incidental noises are more prominent on some tracks than others, and it is somehow one of the more innocuous examples of this that becomes one of the most moving moments on the record. On 'Song For The Setting Sun III', Bachman offers a beautifully solemn, controlled improvisation that illustrates exactly how thoughtful an instrumentalist he has become since his debut release Grey-Black-Green from 2011. After nearly four minutes, a far-away police siren can be heard. It gets closer and closer until it seems to be outside Bachman's window, before fading again. It is difficult to identify exactly why this siren feels so devastating against Bachman's slow picking, but it is perhaps due to its coming in the context of that post-apocalyptic mood created on 'Car', combined with the image it inspires of the artist hunched over a guitar, transfixed as city life whirls around him – and indeed the knowledge that Bachman apparently had the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US election on his mind as he approached this album.

If all this suggests that The Morning Star is a rather disquieting record, then that is not the case. These experimental techniques give Bachman's recordings a unique intimacy and a rare openness. His is a brave music of warmth, community and generosity.

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Tue Jul 31 11:58:24 GMT 2018

The Guardian 80

(Three Lobed Recordings)

In the song-filled world of folk reviewing, instrumental records often get lost in the noise. It doesn’t help that calling an instrumental record “folk” is a perilous business, unless it’s stuffed to the gills with jigs, hornpipes and reels. But many ambient albums hold traces of folk in their performance styles and sounds, and hot summers suit tangles of guitars, searing drones, and strange atmospheres.

Take The Morning Star, the new album by Daniel Bachman. A six-string and lap guitar player from Virginia, he makes music that sounds haunted by older structures and textures. He’s a magical soul – at 28 years old, this is his 12th album already – but much newer ideas collide with his ancient sounds.

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Fri Jul 27 07:30:14 GMT 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Daniel Bachman
The Morning Star

[Three Lobed; 2018]

Rating: 4/5

“The secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence.”
– Alexander Chee

Scent of morning hovering in non-time. Fingers in tense grip on steel-strings pierced on guitar-wood: that’s all it takes to conjure a fallen world wrenched from the landscape’s quiet. The insects and the grass gather in the sound’s offing, where it smells like heavy seawater or dense fudge. A spell casts out from Bachman’s fretboard. Noise, where nothing used to be, torques and twists all relentless and inexhaustible and holds its body up as it tames the air, unseen, chemical-infused and death-laced and biocharred, accompanied by cicada-chirps and train-coughs and ambulance-calls. A bitter sound flings out, drawn over the surface like camouflage, sun-dripped and moon-heavy, licking the frets. Something magical appears. Something peaks in the guitar’s meadow. A heaven, a hell; a fairy, a devil. Hay-bales like sleeping glyptodontsout in the far-off. A Time Away From Time’s Time. Ghost stories that only Bachman can tell.

*

Where there would be no such thing as progress, no divine salvation, only dis-embeddedness and Satan’s immanence where he stood smiling and invisible at crossroads watching the mouths of slave traders make their bribes, there is a biome: the guitar’s biome. Summer’s first whiff of too much sun and creamy clouds; breathing in an open field; opening your eyes in a clean, deep sea; cider by the autumn leaf pile, velvety and dense and whisperingly soft. This whole album feels like all of that: dense but also light, wholesome but also fiendish, like blue cheese or churned foam or peat bogs. It feels en route to something bigger than itself. It’s a metaphysical nudism; Bachman’s imprinting his body onto air, which is time; Bachman wiggling that air in order to wiggle another self out of his own self, so that a state of immanence can appear. To do that, he inserts these pudges of noise fringed with moss and vapor out in the distance of the sound, away from the guitar’s hot breath, away from all the oily green and the sofa-dust. We’re hearing a recording of something larger than a room in a house, larger than a man and his fingers. It’s a place where shadows punctuate and transform the industry, where pastoral and factory meet, where specks of destruction unexpectedly appear from a region we had never anticipated — busily, frenziedly, insistently.

*

A shadow of the Renaissance. A shadow of the Harvest moon. A shadow of the conquistadors. A shadow of a robber’s moonshine. A shadow of a fox, of a buffalo, of a caterpillar. A shadow of ecological time. A shadow of a troubadour’s mouth reciting the poem that convinces the princess to come out of her castle. A wild bee in a sunbeam, picked up by the breeze, executing its pheromone-algorithm. Half-closed and half-dreamt and sometimes in a half-hell and always in media res, The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies. All becomes bathed in star-dew, all draggled by an odor absent from its own self, all wrapped in a timbre-cloud and haunting, cloyed in a ruined mass of wood and steel, hermit-like, ‘mid silence and shade and cool nooks near streams in the fairy-light behind the trees’ curtains, leading us on like a syllable in a poem into a house of sorts, or a painting of sorts, but built with a slackness and industrialness and dirtiness as if it were something not meant to be in a painting, like an un-paved road or a invading species in an ecosystem or a murderer’s grin or cobwebs in a window’s corner. Un peu de temps à l’état pur. The limits of the guitar aren’t the limits of the guitarist anymore. The heart beats on its way home, at last, with the final pluck of the strings.

The Morning Star by Daniel Bachman

Tue Sep 04 04:01:42 GMT 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Daniel Bachman
The Morning Star

[Three Lobed; 2018]

Rating: 4/5

“The secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence.”
– Alexander Chee

Scent of morning hovering in non-time. Fingers in tense grip on steel-strings pierced on guitar-wood: that’s all it takes to conjure a fallen world wrenched from the landscape’s quiet. The insects and the grass gather in the sound’s offing, where it smells like heavy seawater or dense fudge. A spell casts out from Bachman’s fretboard. Noise, where nothing used to be, torques and twists all relentless and inexhaustible and holds its body up as it tames the air, unseen, chemical-infused and death-laced and biocharred, accompanied by cicada-chirps and train-coughs and ambulance-calls. A bitter sound flings out, drawn over the surface like camouflage, sun-dripped and moon-heavy, licking the frets. Something magical appears. Something peaks in the guitar’s meadow. A heaven, a hell; a fairy, a devil. Hay-bales like sleeping glyptodontsout in the far-off. A Time Away From Time’s Time. Ghost stories that only Bachman can tell.

*

Where there would be no such thing as progress, no divine salvation, only dis-embeddedness and Satan’s immanence where he stood smiling and invisible at crossroads watching the mouths of slave traders make their bribes, there is a biome: the guitar’s biome. Summer’s first whiff of too much sun and creamy clouds; breathing in an open field; opening your eyes in a clean, deep sea; cider by the autumn leaf pile, velvety and dense and whisperingly soft. This whole album feels like all of that: dense but also light, wholesome but also fiendish, like blue cheese or churned foam or peat bogs. It feels en route to something bigger than itself. It’s a metaphysical nudism; Bachman’s imprinting his body onto air, which is time; Bachman wiggling that air in order to wiggle another self out of his own self, so that a state of immanence can appear. To do that, he inserts these pudges of noise fringed with moss and vapor out in the distance of the sound, away from the guitar’s hot breath, away from all the oily green and the sofa-dust. We’re hearing a recording of something larger than a room in a house, larger than a man and his fingers. It’s a place where shadows punctuate and transform the industry, where pastoral and factory meet, where specks of destruction unexpectedly appear from a region we had never anticipated — busily, frenziedly, insistently.

*

A shadow of the Renaissance. A shadow of the Harvest moon. A shadow of the conquistadors. A shadow of a robber’s moonshine. A shadow of a fox, of a buffalo, of a caterpillar. A shadow of ecological time. A shadow of a troubadour’s mouth reciting the poem that convinces the princess to come out of her castle. A wild bee in a sunbeam, picked up by the breeze, executing its pheromone-algorithm. Half-closed and half-dreamt and sometimes in a half-hell and always in media res, The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies. All becomes bathed in star-dew, all draggled by an odor absent from its own self, all wrapped in a timbre-cloud and haunting, cloyed in a ruined mass of wood and steel, hermit-like, ‘mid silence and shade and cool nooks near streams in the fairy-light behind the trees’ curtains, leading us on like a syllable in a poem into a house of sorts, or a painting of sorts, but built with a slackness and industrialness and dirtiness as if it were something not meant to be in a painting, like an un-paved road or a invading species in an ecosystem or a murderer’s grin or cobwebs in a window’s corner. Un peu de temps à l’état pur. The limits of the guitar aren’t the limits of the guitarist anymore. The heart beats on its way home, at last, with the final pluck of the strings.

The Morning Star by Daniel Bachman

Tue Sep 04 04:01:42 GMT 2018

Pitchfork 76

No longer content to play music tethered to the past, the Virginia guitarist uses field recordings and unsettling ambient experiments to remake his virtuosic folk compositions for the present.

Fri Jul 27 05:00:00 GMT 2018