| Tongue Depressor Photo. |
At first, you think the fiddles are just tuning. One sounds off at a low-bellied moan beneath the other, which sails over it like raw silk. They slither around like basilisks, figuring out which will lead and which will follow. The melodies try to braid themselves together, teasing out a third, then a fourth tonality. It is only well over a minute in—a minute and 20 seconds, to be exact—that it becomes entirely clear this is exactly how it’s supposed to sound.
The “it” is Tongue Depressor’s fourth volume of droney, whining and fully transcendent fiddle music, released in March of this year by New Haven musician Zach Rowden and Vermont native Henry Birdsey. An arrhythmic sound bath from start to finish, the album transports its listeners over two long tracks, each just short of 20 minutes. The album is available on the group's Bandcamp page; listeners can also catch the two at The State House on April 10.
Rowden and Birdsey started trundling towards Volume Four over a year ago, when the two first met each other at a fiddle studio in upstate New York, brought together to play the work of Hartt School of Music teacher and composer Robert Carl. At the time, Birdsey said, neither of them were as deep into their practice as they are now, figuring out the instruments they were playing as they went along. After releasing the first volume in May of last year, the two continued to experiment.
The tracks fall into a genre of drone music, where an instrument or cluster of instruments whines, hums and murmurs for long stretches of time, until one is fully submerged in it. When they were recording, Rowden and Birdsey said they were especially inspired by Appalachian fiddle music and the Pentecostal church, which has a particular stronghold in that region of the country. But the volumes buck the conventions of fiddle: pieces pass clear over the jammy, old time tradition and take one to a very specific kind of church instead. Or as Rowden said in a recent interview, “what you get if you put fiddle music in a blender.”
“It's a past we were never aware of,” he said of delving into the histories of snake handling, speaking in tongues, and the Pentecostal church itself, and the outer limits of what the fiddle can actually do. “I think for this band specifically, it's a band about trances, we're trying to open a portal.”
And they have, multiple times. If Volume One has some real (and intended) nails-on-a-chalkboard moments, Volume Four is fresh, creamed butter cut with hallucinogens. After a recent show in Tennessee, Birdsey recalled talking to a fan who couldn’t remember what had happened between the first two minutes of the song and the crowd's applause some 15 minutes later.
Each track is named for people who have been lost to the history the band is channeling, including serpent-handling pastor Jamie Coots, who died of a rattlesnake bite in 2014, and 18-year-old Harry Skelton, who died after handling and being bitten by a snake in Cleveland, Tennessee in 1946. In “For Shirley Hall,” off the most recent release, the two start in a language of whines, ironing them into a sort of dissonant, rusted sonata.
There are real moments of sublimity, as the music lifts into something that almost sounds right, and then dips again into controlled chaos. Around the fiddles blooms a whole geography of sound: mountainous, earthy fiddle but also twentieth century gospel, Gregorian chants, Creole fiddle slides and nineteenth-century funerary marches. It’s easy to slip into the music, and emerge 16 minutes later with a sense that you’ve been somewhere else entirely.
“We're not intending to send them [people] into weird states,” Birdsey said. “But when you kind of trust us a little bit, there are all these kinds of things that happen.”
To learn more about Tongue Depressor, visit its Bandcamp Page and check out the embed below. Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey will perform at The State House with Pedestrian Deposit, OMEI, and DJs Mordecai & F. Esther on April 10; tickets and more information here.