f26 Appalachian Uncontrolled
Anna & Elizabeth get to the heart of American traditional music by presenting it in different and challenging ways. Tim Chipping went on the road with them. Photos by Judith Burrows.
S
omething is happening. Some- thing that isn’t expected. Two performers we’ve known from before walk slowly onto the stage from different sides,
dressed alike. They don’t say hello. They do not ask how we, the audience is feeling. Instead they exhale and intone then sing: “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleepy little baby/When you wake, get some cake and ride them pretty little horses.” And as they sing, their heads and hands entwine, each following the movement of the other.
The song finishes. There’s applause. And Anna and Elizabeth don’t say how pleased they are to be here, what a nice day it’s been or how good the cakes are in the café. They sing a ballad. A ballad that spawns an improvisation, the old words now abstracted from their source, rising in the air faintly like smoke. Something has changed. Yet this is a folk club crowd in a regional arts centre. And folk club crowds like things how they like them. What do we make of this? How are we feeling? Is that feeling discomfort?
“I kind of hope that it is,” says Anna- Roberts-Gevalt, who grew up in rural Ver- mont but now lives in Brooklyn. “I feel like we’ve absorbed a lot of experimental music and theatre in the last two years. It’s totally accepted within the free improvised music community to just stand on a stage and go…” Anna proceeds to make a sound like an anguished elephant. “And then us tour- ing what we do and people being, ‘Ooh that’s a little weird,’ and I’m like, ‘No! In the context of modern performance this is not weird at all.’ It’s not even a small step towards strange.”
“So I think it helped me articulate some of the things I don’t always like about folk music performance. There are moments when nostalgia reigns supreme, when com- fort reigns supreme. There’s this idea of you as a performer where you have to be so con- nected to your audience that you want to make sure everyone’s feeling OK. And so you become limited by this desire to please your audience. And then seeing there’s this other music that is about challenging your audi- ence, and that opened my eyes because I felt like there are parts of old music that are very challenging. Both in the content or if you lis- ten to any of the field recordings they have weird discordant sounds and drones. And I think part of what we’ve always loved is the unpleasantness of some of this.”
“The crunchy parts,” is how Elizabeth describes the sonic peculiarities of old-time recorded music. “Yesterday, even doing a workshop on Appalachian music and play- ing a couple of field recordings of different styles it’s a reminder that actually a lot of people aren’t used to the way it sounds. A lovely woman said, ‘It sounds so much like they’re just shouting.’”
“I spent a month listening to field recordings in Vermont,” Anna continues, “finding songs for this show and the record. And just the experience of listening to so much white noise all day was really intense and draining. Then I went to a show by [electronic musician] Dan Deacon and his music was so loud and when he was singing it was so muddied within the mix. He’s pro- cessing his voice and you can’t understand it, and it reminded me of the field recording and it lit a lightbulb. It was like, modern folk musicians in a way are expected to be these people who dig into the past, sort through all this stuff, and then present something to an audience that’s in a very digestible package. Like saying, ‘Hey, I delved into the chaotic archive, found this ballad through all the white noise, maybe it’s even a fragment of the ballad, but I pieced one together and now it makes sense. And here I am singing it through a nice microphone with a bunch of modern chords that will help you engage.’”
“But that experience to me, which gets back to this idea of discomfort, is this idea of how we’re not always able to translate the past. I don’t know what these old singers were really thinking; I didn’t go there; I don’t know what this song is about; I’m one person singing this song and I can know what I think it means to me. But you can’t pin it down and to me the discomfort is part of that. Let’s question this assump- tion that we can access everything. We can’t access everything. So I feel like all the grain- iness on field recordings is a reminder of that wall between us and understanding.”
The songs are audibly buried under
the past. “Yeah, and you can try to illumi- nate moments of it or have clear moments but often you’re just wandering through the mist.”
It might come as a relief to some and a disappointment to others that Anna and Elizabeth’s current show isn’t in the least bit unpleasant. And if our regional folk club crowd are feeling discomforted then no-one
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