root salad f14 Stone Breath
Timothy Renner’s doombanjo psych folk isn’t for the faint hearted, but Jeanette Leechwas never that…
A
t the outset, Stone Breath was Timothy, alone but for his girlfriend (now wife) Alison and a strong individual philosophy. “I was interested in nature poetry and spent hours walking in the woods. I was always looking for that liminal feeling, the spirit of nature,” he says. Around 1995, he conceptualised acoustic music as ‘earth music’. “The guitars are made of wood, the banjo is made of skin and wood, with metal strings, and all these are elements of the earth. I wanted the music to sound like it could be from any time. There was a lot of focus on earthly tones and on natural feeling.” The first Stone Breath album, Songs Of Moonlight And Rain, was released in 1997. Few heard it, but those in the know adored its untutored beauty. However, Timothy is now ambivalent about it. “I don’t listen to [the first album],” says Timothy. “I was struggling psychologically with having been told over the years ‘you can’t sing – why are you trying to do this?’ But, being more naïve, I was willing to try anything, and I think that adds to the feel of it.”
By the second album, 1998’s A Silver Timothy Renner, Brooke Elizabeth, Don Belch “T
his is very much in my heart,” says Timothy Renner, speaking of Stone Breath, the uncompromising acid
folk band he founded in 1995. “I do get very emotional about it. Folk music is the true love of mine, and it probably will be my entire life.” It could also be said that Stone Breath is a true love of mine. Their back catalogue of seven albums (plus numerous side projects, limited editions and compilations) is amongst the most intellectually challenging and emotionally fulfilling music I’ve ever heard.
The story of Stone Breath is one of two halves. There is the first period, beginning in 1995 and ending in 2003; and there is the rebirth, which began in 2009 and continues apace. Spanning both eras, Stone Breath has also explored complementary, but separate, musical methods. “There’s the more involved, experimental approach,” says Timothy. “And then there’s the shorter, more per- sonal approach.”
Thread To Weave The Seasons, Stone Breath expanded to include Prydwyn (the pair bonded over a love of the Incredible String Band); and by the third, 2000’s Lanterna Lucis Viriditatis, Sarada Holt joined as a third member. “Prydwyn will write vocal harmonies, and Sarada is a nat- ural harmony singer,” says Timothy, “and that’s certainly one of my favourite things about the band.” The trio became excep- tionally close friends as well as bandmates, and shared esoteric interests. Stone Breath grew in ambition: the intricate lyrical mat- ter of Lanterna Lucis Viridatatis, exploring apocryphal Christianity, is evidence enough of that.
The first Stone Breath epoch ended with the darkest acid-folk album since Comus’s 1971 blood-spattered First Utter- ance: 2003’s The Silver Skein Unwound. “I was not in a happy place,” Timothy says. “We recorded it quickly, and that was probably a good thing.” Renner called a halt to Stone Breath almost immediately after its release. “I was frustrated with the music scene and myself,” he says.
Stone Breath had been a cult band in a tiny musical niche, but devoted fans – not to mention Prydwyn and Sarada – sorely missed the group. “I was the only one that was keeping Stone Breath from happening,” says Timothy. He kept busy in other projects, and then, in 2008, embarked on a mission to reissue the Stone Breath back catalogue. “When I did the reissues, it really hit me hard how
much I loved making music with Prydwyn and Sarada.” There was also a more per- sonal dimension.
“In late September of 2007 I went blind in my left eye, very suddenly,” he says. “It started hurting very badly, and then went blurry, and in a matter of days I could only see light and dark. As you can imagine, this was a frightening thing. A battery of tests revealed that I have Multi- ple Sclerosis, as my mother and maternal grandmother also had. I have been lucky in that I regained about 90 percent of my sight, and have had very few attacks since, and nothing serious. I honestly hadn’t thought of it in terms of my music, but very likely the MS diagnosis played a major, if subconscious, role in driving me back to Stone Breath full-time. Certainly, and con- sciously, this is the reason for my increased output since that time. MS is a whip at my back – and perhaps in a very positive way.”
I
The first fruit of the resurrected Stone Breath was 2009’s The Shepherdess And The Bone White Bird. An extraordinarily powerful, at times confessional, medita- tion on existence, death and spirituality, the album opens with the lines “I heard the fingers of the dead / Crawling from inside my head.” Stone Breath was back.
n the last year, there have been new members – Don Belch and Brooke Elizabeth joining full-time – and two further full-length records. “I thought I’d like to get back to the approach of the first two Stone Breath albums, so I started writing some shorter songs,” Timothy says of the first, The Night Birds Psalm. “But at the same time we were recording some longer pieces that now [form] The Ætheric Lamp. It became pretty obvious that they were two separate albums, so we split them apart. The Ætheric Lamp is akin to Lanterna Lucis Viriditatis, albeit informed and influenced by Persian music rather than just a general ‘Eastern’ influence. And, when the lyrics are less personal, in a sense it allows me to be more extroverted with the music.”
Timothy Renner knows that Stone Breath is an intense experience, and that people have to seek the band out under their own volition. “Last year I found sev- eral letters from Clive Palmer,” he says, “as we’d written way back when I first started Stone Breath. He wrote, ‘[Your music is] very nice. I just want to let you know you’re never going to make any money through it.’” Timothy chuckles. “That should have been a warning, I guess, to a more practical purpose. But when I play Stone Breath, I’m very much at home.”
www.myspace.com/stonebreath F
Photo: Sarah Lyon
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