BRIAN HARNETTY & BONNIE PRINCE BILLY - Silent City

In a year that has not been particularly prolific for Bonnie "Prince" Billy, any new recording featuring him is a small pleasure for the audience of one of the most important songwriters of the last thirty years. That the collaboration is with Brian Harnetty, an Ohio musician devoted to the folk of the Appalachian mountains, confirms that Will Oldham is constantly searching for fresh cultural inspirations to enrich his musical legacy.

As on his previous albums, Harnetty draws connecting threads between past and present through rural recordings, voices captured from the radio, and samples woven together with acoustic instrumentation: banjo, tinkling bells, toy piano, fiddle, and the blues that so defined the sound of the first American folk bands.

Forty minutes of quiet, elusive, atmosphere-rich music. The term drone, so often overused elsewhere, fits many of Harnetty's sonic excursions like a glove.

The enchantment of the title track is just one example of the two musicians' great intuitions, while on "The Top Hat" every instrument vibrates toward a single, captivating direction, blending into harmonies and grooves that intersect: a remarkable synthesis of folk and avant-garde that deserves attention.

Harnetty uses samplers in a unique way. Instruments and rhythms follow no linear tonal structure, creating many counterpoints with Bonnie "Prince" Billy's delightful singing. Even the vocal samples are marked by seductive imperfections and an apparent lack of musicality; beauty is released in new and mysterious forms. The music becomes a narrative that intersects with the memories and urges evoked by the voices.

Warmer, more suggestive tones push Harnetty's creations toward hypnotic shores. Bonnie "Prince" Billy's voice anchors the precious and unsettling rhythms of "And Under The Winesap", the concept of rural folk is rewritten and stripped of superfluous harmonies, and fragility becomes the harmonic strength of precious moments such as "It's Different Now", an evocative blend of voices and crystalline sounds.

On "Silent City", every acoustic or electronic sound, in its interplay with the human element, becomes a natural product of collective memory. The words give movement to every episode of the album.

As on any good record, there is a small masterpiece of emotional perfection, and it is called "Some Glad Day": solemn and lyrically robust, the track embodies the sublime alchemy of a new rural folk that becomes art. Within it are dream, life, death, and poetry; everything becomes a single archive of emotions and hopes.

The final ecstasy of "To Hear Still More", built on harmonium and piano, dispels any doubt about the essentiality of this project. "Silent City" is an album with an original and powerful sonic language, a starting point for the future of new American folk music. The two musicians fuse folk and electronic music somewhat in the manner of Eno and Byrne on "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", although a greater fragmentation and a lesser exotic allure keep "Silent City" from reaching excellence. 

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17/12/2009