On 'When the Roses Come Again' Daniel Bachman returns to the past and does a wonderful job in skilfully blending his electronic touches with traditional music. Of his whole quartet of recent work, starting with 2018's Morning Star, this is his strongest . . . -Glenn Kimpton
Bachman has a dedicated fan base who is tightly focused on his next steps. While he has always been restless with his art, his stylistic changes in 2020's "Axacan" demonstrated - and excited - many within that fan base as to how transformative his work and vision can be for "traditional" music in these modern times. This fresh work continued with 2022's "Almanac Behind". "When The Roses Come Again" is a perfect next step to this trendline, a synthesis of tradition and abstraction. In other words, it is yet another vivid reimagining of what a "traditional" album can be in modern times. On this LP Bachman takes acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle and mouth harp alongside oscillators, drum apps and more to construct one-man string band compositions. Integrating technology as a tool for collage, as well as acoustic instruments that pre-date all of us, Bachman excitingly creates an album that has as much to do with Terry Riley, Laraaji, Eno’s late 70’s ambient albums, and 75 Dollar Bill, as it does the Carter Family, Stanley Brothers, and Hobart Smith. "When The Roses Come Again" is destined to thrill those who have been so enamored with Bachman's past exciting turns as well as pull new folks into the folks who are excited by new sounds.
The guitarist Daniel Bachman has announced a new album, When The Roses Come Again — his follow-up to Almanac Behind will come out almost exactly a year since his last one. He self-recorded When The Roses Come Again in a cabin near Shenandoah National Park, as he worked as a carpenter’s assistant and used his woodworking abilities to modify instruments of his own. Today, he’s sharing “Summer’s Fingers Sweetly Linger (Everywhere On Every Side)” from it.
“Like much of the record, this track features a cut and paste music making style that I’ve really come to enjoy lately,” he said in a statement. “The banjo melody that is woven over top of the fiddle and drum machine drone was assembled using hundreds of individual pieces of fretless banjo improvisations, where I cut each note, or series of notes out, and then rearranged, augmented, etc. until I found a new piece that I liked.”
He continued:
The banjo is a cheap aluminum pot “Hondo” banjo that I got off ebay and then pulled all the frets from, giving it that fluid feel that floats right on top of the rhythm track. The songs title, “Summer’s Fingers Sweetly Linger (Everywhere On Everyside)”, like all the tracks on the record, comes from a traditional tune titled “When the Roses Come again”, which was played by the Carter Family and many more. While this record doesn’t sound much like traditional music from the early part of the 20 century, I used all stringband instruments to assemble it, even if they were heavily processed at times, and I personally think of When The Roses Come Again as my attempt at making a stringband record, playing the cycles of the seasons, their birth, death, and rebirth, from sunrise to sunset each day, and through every year here on Earth. -James Rettig
The fingerstyle experimentalist’s new album bends guitar, mouth bow, field recordings, and electronic detritus into vast tapestries of pliant drone.
By Philip Sherburne
“Recording is something I’m not terribly excited about,” Daniel Bachman admitted in 2017. “Things never come out the way I’d like them to.” The Fredericksburg, Virginia, fingerstyle prodigy had been making records for eight years at that point, beginning when he was just 19. But he’d been touring for even longer, since shortly after having his head “split open” by discovering John Fahey and Jack Rose at the tender age of 16. The music that Bachman plays—folk, ragtime, and blues, much of it very old—is a conversation between past and present, writer and interpreter, performer and audience. It’s a living thing. It’s easy to see how he might feel that sealing it off in the studio was a surefire way to see it die on the vine. But in recent years, Bachman has found a new approach to recording, approaching the studio as an instrument in its own right. Old yarn, new loom: On albums like Axacan, The Morning Star, and Almanac Behind, he wove folk and bluegrass together with bells, field recordings, and staticky scraps of radio into vast tapestries of pliant drone.
Bachman continues that method on When the Roses Come Again, though to call its place of origin a “studio” might be a stretch. He recorded the album on his laptop during a week’s worth of improvisations, eight hours a day, in a cabin where he worked as a carpenter’s assistant. He built or modified many of the instruments he used. He fashioned an Appalachian mouth bow, a single-stringed instrument of African origin, and de-fretted a banjo; he also availed himself of sound-making apps on his phone. Yet the overall feel is less turbulent than on the sprawling Axacan or the apocalyptic Almanac Behind. The focus has returned to the sounds of his guitar and banjo, which weave, snakelike, through shimmering fields of harmonium and electronic squeal.
Like all of Bachman’s work, When the Roses Come Again is all instrumental. In contrast to the dazzling pickwork of his early albums, much of the playing is tentative and muted, warily teasing out halting melodies from the greater tangle. There are no real songs to speak of—just scenes, which flow together as seamlessly as fields glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The album is clearly meant to be experienced as a single piece of music, and the pacing is immaculate. Introductory passages of pentatonic riffs and electronic pedal tones give way to gravelly mouth bowing and cascading sheets of feedback; noisy peaks ease off into spidery banjo and guitar. The recording’s fidelity sounds like a tape that’s been rescued from a truck at the bottom of a lake; the mix of drone and noise suggests a lineage with Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad, Flying Saucer Attack, and Wolf Eyes. (The mouth bowing, meanwhile, had me thinking about Tuvan throat singing and Attila Csihar’s work with Sunn O))).) Halfway through, the album rises to a feverish climax of squeaking and rattling—could there be a jackhammer in the mix?—that sounds like someone playing banjo along to a beaten-up copy of Metal Machine Music.
When the Roses Come Again feels like a companion to The Morning Star and Almanac Behind, the third record in a loose trilogy. Both of those albums were preoccupied with cyclical movements: The Morning Star, informed by the chaos of the Trump presidency, took cues from the 24-hour news cycle; Almanac Behind, a response to the climate emergency, depicted natural cycles being thrown out of joint. (Almanac Behind was even designed to be playable in an unbroken loop.) When the Roses Come Again zooms out to consider the cosmic cycle of existence. In a note accompanying the release, Bachman writes of his interest in capturing “the spiritual machinery” of birth, death, and rebirth: the seasonal course of his garden, the “churning of centuries” within his own family.
As is often the case in Bachman’s music, the album’s deeper conceptual meaning is never made obvious, but the songs’ titles may be a hint. Each one—“Neath the Shadow, Down the Meadow”; “Leaves Lying on Each Side”; “By the River, Flowers Shiver (Fading Dying in Their Pride),” etc.—is taken from the lyrics of an old bluegrass song, “When the Roses Come Again,” which the Carter Family wrote and first recorded in 1933. The titles follow more or less the order of the lines in the original song, and, much like the album’s song breaks, their relationship to the music might appear arbitrary. But those dying flowers and budding blossoms suit the album’s cyclical give and take. The meaning of the Carter Family’s song is ambiguous; a tale of a sorrowful leavetaking, it could be interpreted as a love song, but it is also heavy with deathly foreboding. It contains traces of Christian allegory, but also fainter fragments of much older, wilder ways of marking time. The song’s lyrics offer something like a spiritual scaffolding for Bachman’s questing melodies and unruly drones—a way of making sense of squalling vacillations that even their creator may not completely understand.
Continuing the trajectory of his releases over the past few years, Daniel Bachman moves further into the world of musique concrete, this time around combining played, found, and manipulated sounds on a laptop. Named for a Carter Family song, the words of which provide the titles for the tracks, When the Roses Come Again is a densely layered and highly detailed recording. Snatches of often heavily treated fretless banjo (sometimes with slide-like effects, as on “Till the roses come again”) and guitar share space with other sounds apparently attributable to a mouth bow (a simple one-stringed instrument for which the mouth serves as a resonator), fiddle, and samples of bells and harmonium, though these are less obvious.
The tracks are generally concise (only two exceed four minutes), but they blend together into a kind of suite. There is a satisfying balance among those that are fairly noisy, bordering on industrial (though not aggressive), such as “As I wander, I will ponder,” those that are more melodic and less dense, such as “Happy hearts that feel no pain,” and those in which the emphasis alternates between texture and melody, such as “On a summer over yonder.” Nearly always, a drone of some sort either provides the background or dominates, and the electronics or treated sounds sometimes create a rhythm, as on the closing track. The resulting blend of sweeter, more bucolic tones with shimmering and percussive electronics is initially disconcerting but comes to feel organic, like a kind of palimpsest.
It’s been fascinating to observe Bachman developing his approach to Americana from Takoma school guitar excursions to the very modern sounds featured on his recent recordings. His increasing attention to the overt symbols of roots music exemplified by his use of Carter Family material has coincided with increasing incorporation of technology and its artifacts (such as the recurring buzzes, hums, and rattles heard here). Whereas last year’s Almanac Behind used a similar approach to address the weighty, almost suffocating issue of climate change, the focus here is personal, on the cycle of death and rebirth that defines existence. This is, in other words, still serious music, yet it is not necessarily somber. Probably not coincidentally, When the Roses Come Again provides the perfect soundtrack for a drive through a land of woods, farms, and small towns dotted with Dollar General stores and cell towers. -Jim Marks
***
by Jeff Terich
November 19, 2023
Since at least as far back as 2018’s The Morning Star, Virginia guitarist and soundscapist Daniel Bachman has been allowing more space between the music he actively makes and that which once defined his earlier works. From his early twenties, he made a name for himself as an American primitivist guitarist in the tradition of John Fahey or Robbie Basho, with an increasing tendency toward lengthier drones and raga-influenced hypnotic sustain. Over time, the pluck and sweep of steel strings has given way to heavier sheets of electronics and glitching effects, the sound of a corrupted nth generation recording of Americana offering only fleeting glimpses of the more direct and immediate folk that comprised his own early catalog.
On last year’s Almanac Behind, a distorted and abstract weather-focused quilt of field recordings and lo-fi instrumentals, Bachman pursued that idea to its farthest limits. When the Roses Come Again doesn’t feel as if it’s intended to pivot off that idea so much as it’s in conversation with that record and, more broadly, all of Bachman’s work to date. He composed and recorded each of its songs with traditional American folk instruments, like an aluminum pot banjo he bought on eBay, then put them through various layers of effects and processing after the fact, its seamless sequence of music like that of a patchwork of samples stitched together with hum and static.
At its simplest, When the Roses Come Again is a showcase for Bachman’s own beautifully meditative playing, moments like “Leaves lying on each side” a stark flutter of plucked strings that rush in like a soothing breeze. Yet such relatively straightforward moments are few and far between, Bachman sounding not like he’s playing these instruments so much as channeling them via seance, building a majestic and resonant series of drones on “By the river, flowers shiver (Fading dying in their pride)”, setting distressed guitar recordings against a thumping heartbeat pulse on “I must leave you someone’s saying,” and employing simple banjo arpeggios as a foundation upon which to build an ultimately grander and more cinematic piece with “On a summer over yonder (with joy to you and I)”. By the end of side two standout “Someone’s Roaming In the Gloaming,” the suggestion of inclement weather on the horizon becomes a full-blown storm, white noise turning to majestic walls of distortion.
Bachman has said that When the Roses Come Again was inspired by cycles of birth, death and renewal, his music not just in conversation with itself, but with more than a century of American roots music. It’s an album that speaks through the instruments of folk and bluegrass musicians before him, Bachman both resurrecting sounds of generations upon generations and filtering them through states of distortion and decay. It just as often channels the haunted frequencies of Tim Hecker’s ambient disintegration as it does traditional acoustic music. When the Roses Come Again is a breathtaking meditation on past, present and future, the terrestrial realm and the beyond, drawing beauty from that which has faded, wilted and returned to the earth.
***
An album of old timey-new timey one-man-string-and-glitch-band music proves a balm for Jon Buckland
Jon Buckland
Published 10:24am 7 December 2023
When The Roses Come Again feels like it was recorded by someone standing at the entrance to a barn, looking out across the plains as spring turns to summer and summer into autumn. And there’s a good reason for that – it was. Daniel Bachman holed up in a cabin in the Shenandoah National Park with little more than a laptop and a set of handmade instruments (including an Appalachian mouth bow) and, although this Virginia retreat is a good 11 hour drive from Chicago, the bucolic folk-fingering on display gives the sense that he was gazing out upon the same grand vistas as Pan American.
An idling engine here, the wriggle of a reclining rattlesnake there. The clank of cowbells signalling a disturbed herd tottering up a hill. On ‘By The River, Flowers Shiver (Fading dying in their pride)’ double-strummed strings cause glorious waves of silver to rise as Bachman veers away from traditional scales and, instead, appears to be attacking the instruments like a man chopping wood.
Pan American isn’t the only touch point. ‘Someone Straying, Long Delaying’ sounds akin to John Fahey covering the Sun City Girls. Or vice versa. And the finger-picked ambience of ‘Sunshine Over Clover Blossom On The Meadow Wide’ is pure Bad Timing-era Jim O’Rourke. This is more than mere imitation, however. Bachman is building on his forebears. And he certainly has forebears to build upon – he’s related, on his mother’s side, to the Hostetler Blind Family Band. A mid-19th century string band, all born blind (including some born without eyes). When The Roses Come Again is his own one-man-string-and-glitch-band.
Which brings us to another aspect of the record: how it entwines with (more) modern technology. There’s an oscillator-drawn drone coursing throughout the album, linking tracks together like an aural paste, and the finale is formed from a faltering loop of softly padding noise which Bachman picks his gently reverb-ed guitar lines over. Metallic scrapes and whirrs fill in for rusting birds announcing a new dawn on ‘As I wander, I will ponder (On a happy by and by)’, which, like the rising sun banishing the night, expels an air of despondence which had permeated the front half of the record.
Shackled to that late optimism is an interest in obsolete electronics. Particularly those used for communication. ’Someone’s Roaming In The Gloaming’, for example, features a treated voice skipping vowels and clashing consonants as if a distant answerphone has developed a stutter. The penultimate track burbles and gurgles like a sputtering fax machine whereas opener, ‘Neath The Shadow, Down The Meadow’, sounds like someone trying to mash a banjo through a dial-up modem.
Communicative loss seems to be at the heart of these archaic electronics struggling to transmit their messages. When juxtaposed with the permeating air of folk-y tranquility, it’s difficult to ignore Bachman’s implied yearning for a simpler age. And who can blame him? The world’s a lot right now. Maybe it always has been and always will be. Still, pulling up a chair and surveying a vast expanse, with little more than a six string and a crackling phone line, sure sounds lovely.
Daniel Bachman, “When The Roses Come Again”
Label: Three Lobed Recordings – TLR-149
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: Nov 17, 2023
Style: Americana, Psych Folk, Country
Visit: https://danielbachman.bandcamp.com/
1. Neath The Shadows, Down The Meadow 0:37
2. Leaves Lying On Each Side 2:41
3. By The River, Flowers Shiver (Fading Dying In Their Pride) 2:57
4. Someone Straying, Long Delaying 3:45
5. Sad The Parting Down The Lane 1:24
6. I Must Leave You Someone's Saying 4:14
7. Till The Roses Come Again 3:15
8. As I Wander, I Will Ponder (On A Happy By And By) 2:48
9. On A Summer Over Yonder (With Joy To You And I) 3:25
10. Sunshine Over Clover Blossom On The Meadow Wide 2:43
11. Summer's Fingers Sweetly Linger (Everywhere On Every Side) 4:21
12. Someone's Roaming In The Gloaming 2:26
13. Happy Hearts That Feel No Pain 2:38
14. All Their Sadness Turned To Gladness 1:21
15. Now The Roses Come Again 4:08
Credits
Cover, Illustration – Sarah Bachman
Guitar, Banjo, Fiddle – Daniel Bachman
Harmonium, Handbell – Tyler Magill (tracks: 03, 05, 10)
Layout, Design – Darryl Norsen
Mastered By – Chuck Johnson
Photography – Daniel Bachman
Notes
All guitar, banjo, fiddle, mouthbow and other instruments performed by Daniel Bachman.
Harmonium and hand bells on tracks 3, 5 and 10 played by Tyler Magill.
Source materials recorded between March 4-10, 2023. Edited between April-July 2023. All recording and edited done in Weakley Hollow / Banco, Madison County, Virginia.
Photographs by Daniel Bachman.
Cover illustration by Sarah Bachman.
Layout/design by Darryl Norsen.
Mastering by Chuck Johnson.
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