Redscroll Records / US / 2024
Tongue Depressor (New Haven, CT) is the duo of Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey. They write, improvise, and perform drone-based music with fiddles, pedal steel, lap steel, contrabass, organ, and bells, usually involving microtonal tunings and re-arranged/re-tuned fragments of American church music.
Austin Larkin (New Haven, CT) uses elements of tone, interstices of fields, asymmetries, and patterns. Performance and practice informed by research into dimensions of vibrating bodies.
On this recording Tongue Depressor and Austin Larkin have combined to record what they had been practicing on the road live across the US together. Henry Birdsey (TD) plays bagpipes and lap steel. Zach Rowden (TD) plays violin and tapes. Austin Larkin plays viola and sirens (which he himself constructed and are a story unto themselves). Soothing sounds give way to unsettling / unnerving feelings when the sirens find their way through meditative loops.
Mastering and lacquers for this recording have been provided by Rashad Becker.