Needlefall

The music on Needlefall is borne of one region, but two worlds. It finds Durham, North Carolina guitar- and-fiddle duo Evan Morgan and Courtney Werner rooting their music in Southern working class old-time traditions, most explicitly on album opener, ‘A Dance on a Sunday Night’. An infectiously melodic frolic based on tunes originally recorded by West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons, it’s the sound of Woody Guthrie freight-hopping with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. But, like fellow NC natives Nathan Bowles, Sarah Louise and Sally Anne Morgan, the Tubers are at their most engaging when toying with established Appalachian idioms, dismantling them into impressionistic sketches pregnant with pause and silence (‘The Hermit’s Passage’), introducing global dialects (check rebetiko-style lament, ‘The Long-Suffering’, boasting some breathy mournfulness courtesy of local legend Crowmeat Bob’s snaking sax and clarinet) or incorporating non-musical elements (the evocative creek-side field-recordings of ‘Water Dripped Upwards’, captured on a spooky night out in the wilds). Such moments reveal Magic Tuber Stringband as worthy successors of another North Carolina tradition, that of highly influential arts institution Black Mountain College and the liberating, often transcendent, musical experiments of its former tutors, John Cage and Lou Harrison.