NEW ALBUMS
SARAH LOUISE
Blooms and blossoms of electronics drift across elemental folk songs.
By Jon Dale
Earth Bow
EARTHBOW
8/10
Sarah Louise: an intuitive relationship with the natural world
JUDY HENSON
“MEDITATION is fundamental because it puts me in touch with my body,” American guitarist and singersongwriter Sarah Louise reflects when asked about her ‘Earth practices’, “which as an extension of Earth, communicates differently than my thinking mind.” Read one way, this deceptively simple statement hosts an entire universe of potential: the use of meditation and intimate reflection to loosen the shackles of the always-busy mind and openit to the mysterious other; placing a pause upon the hurriedness of our everyday existence; prioritising the knowledges and intuitions of the body over the ideological conceits of society. Louise’s musical path to this point has been refreshingly direct. She first broke cover last decade, with a string of lovely, singular guitar solo albums. Louise also recorded two gorgeous LPs of beautiful folk-drone constructs with Black Twig Pickers member Sally Anne Morgan as House & Land. Significant changes came with Louise’s own 2019 record Nighttime Birds And Morning Stars, though, where she turned a radical corner, her guitar interfacing with electronics in feverishly creative ways. Tellingly, she seemed to bring the same capacious energies that marked her acoustic guitar sides to her explorations of electronics.
SLEEVE NOTES
1 Where The Owl Hums
2 Jewel Of The Blueridge
3 Mossy Slope
4 Summertime Moves Slow
5 Earth Wakes Up
6 Your Dreams
7 Surrender To The Night
8 If You Build A Pond The Frogs Will Come
9 Where Heron Fish At Dawn
10 Healers Circle Up
Produced by: Sarah Louise
Recorded at: home, rural Appalachia
Personnel: Sarah Louise (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, percussion, voice, SP-404SX, synth, flute, digital treatments), Thom Nguyen (drums), Go Kurosawa (bass), Cooper Crain (Yamaha CS-5, bass), katydids, spring peeper frogs, barred owl, screech owl, creek, cardinal and other songbirds (“vocals”)
Earth Bow continues those experiments, though now they feel even less like improvised attempts and more like part of the fundamental bedrock of Louise’s compositions. There’s something natural, fungal almost, about the way the electronics spill and expand across the 10 songs of Earth Bow; it’s no surprise to discover that she has lived in rural Appalachia for a decade, and has a strong, intuitive relationship with the natural world. Strikingly, she has captured some of the complexity of the natural world with her music – there’s unpredictability but harmony too, alongside oneness with the creative impulse, Louise creating handspun cartographies of musical ecologies.