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To Me employs a veritable choir on a piece inspired by Haiti. Char and Robby Roth- schild play eighteen instruments between them on the disc, ranging from standard guitar and variants to trumpet, ney, kora, balafon, accordeon and low whistle. They do, however, have the imagination to use them well and wisely, and also some of the sweetest fraternal harmonies since the Beach Boys. To be fair, the words are often the least important thing here – there’s so much else going on. It’s a veritable garden of earthly delights, Puckish and playful at times, with surprises around every corner, and well worth discovering.
www.roundmountainmusic.com Chris Nickson
TUNNG Turbines Full Time Hobby
THE MEMORY BAND
On The Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs) Static Caravan VAN257
Tunng are a group whose work only occasion- ally registers on the fRoots radar, most notably their Death And The Maiden Retold, on the Imagined Village album from 2007, and their touring and Glastonbury festival collaborations with the mighty Tinariwen a couple of years later.
On this, their fifth studio album, they’ve cooked up nine lyrically impressionistic songs with enigmatic titles like: Once, Embers and Heavy Rock Warning, themed around, er… an imagined village. Tunng paint from a broad musical palette, with a loving atten- tion to detail which is evident everywhere: from the echoes of Saharan guitar motifs on By This and Bloodlines, the acoustic guitar and vocal harmonies (that have Follow Follow ini- tially coming on all Simon & Garfunkely) to the mbira riffs of So Far From Here, and the vintage synthesiser textures deployed throughout.
This is a record that occupies a place on the outer fringes of what constitutes fRoots musical territory, and one whose songs impress somewhat less than its sounds. It’s an enjoy- able listen nonetheless – even for those of us for whom Tunng’s declaration of Turbines as their: “sci-fi, folk-rock album,” is enough to induce nightmarish 1970s flashbacks.
www.tunng.co.uk/ A noted compos-
er, producer, musi- cian, DJ and all-round thoroughly Good Egg, Stephen Crack-
nell has been merrily questing his way across the musical contours of Britain for the best part of a decade now, whether in the compa- ny of his ever-changing Memory Band, or his myriad conceptual projects like The Sum- merisle Society, The Balearic Folk Orchestra and Listen To Britain: Folk on Film. On The Chalk is the result of Cracknell’s exploration of an actual physical landscape: The Harrow Way, an oft-mythologised neolithic trackway that can be traced across southern England from Kent to Devon.
Opening track, The Wearing Of The
Horns, features the sainted vocal talents of both Hannah Caughlin and Olivia Chaney, but from there on in it’s a largely instrumental affair, with voices appearing as vocal textures, or as spoken word, field-recording samples.
Guitars are deployed only sparingly, with piano (played by both Cracknell and Eliza- beth Stutters) the dominant melodic instru- ment, across eleven tracks of engrossing music, crafted from traditional sources and inspirations, which appear to be the results of both meticulous research and freewheeling instinct. If the recorders, glockenspiel, harp,
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