photo: courtesy of keith wood/haire
New Weird America, as Richard Bishop recently said in these pages, is a misnomer. And listening to the music of Virginia natives Jack Rose and Leon Dufficy/Keith Woods’ Hush Arbors, it’s easy to see what he means. There is nothing particularly weird about the music of the bands lumped under this moniker, perhaps other than the fact that it exists under the radar of what “folk” music is usually considered to be, and that it happily takes apart and reinvents America’s rich traditions of guitar and voice, pairing a kind of reverence with an utter disregard for convention.
Listening to Jack Rose and Hush Arbors, two of the movement’s brightest lights, the music seems less the kind of self-conscious experimentalism the Wire’s oft-bandied genreifcation seems to imply than a logical lighting out of folk as a progressive movement, one that borrows as freely from America’s folk past as it does from its equally vibrant history of experimental, improvised music.
photo:courtesy of jack rose/haire
Jack Rose, formerly of the extended drone pioneers Pelt, knows this better than most. Since heading out on his own in 2002, Rose’s virtuosic fingerpicking – often recorded without embellishments in one take – has explored as much Takoma-style magic hour as it has darker-hued extended workouts of his own invention, his nimble fingers equally capable of Eastern raga as ragtime blues, his range increasingly reminiscent of the great steel-string iconoclasts of American guitar.
Keith Wood, now a London native, plays in softer tones, the psychedelic wash of his gauzy folk as unhurried as it is beautiful. Wood often records with the windows open, piecing his songs together from his distant vocals and disarmingly pretty guitar, the whole thing sounding like it came in with the wind itself. Deeply inspired by the nature of his native Virginia, Wood’s records evoke the peace and silence of a mountain retreat, his gorgeous melodies equally affecting when brushed in slow-burning psych as they are unadorned.
On their eve of the Berlin show, I asked Jack and Keith to free associate on their home towns, their favorite German, and how they’d like to retire.
First instrument:
Keith: Sister’s guitar
Jack: Guitar
Favorite band as a teen:
Keith: Neil Young
Jack: Grateful Dead
A great under recognized record:
Keith: John Phillips, “Wolfking of L.A.”
Jack: Eliminator
Home town:
Keith: Now, London, U.K; growing up, Waynesboro, Virginia
Jack: Richmond, [Virginia]
First show:
Keith: Bob Dylan
Jack: B.B. King and Miles Davis
Favorite German:
Keith: Werner Herzog
Jack: Michael Rother
Most recent record:
Keith: Split 45 with Wooden Wand
Jack: dr ragtime and pals
Choice for the next president of the USA:
Keith: Obama
Jack: Voting is stupid
Current obsession:
Keith: Tom Petty
Jack: Pornography
Your dream collaboration:
Keith: Duo w/ Neil Young
Jack: Glenn Jones
Last holiday:
Keith: Home to see my folks in Virginia over christmas
Jack: Don’t remember
Solution to global warming:
Keith: Walking
Jack: I have none
Alternate, non-musical vocation:
Keith: A nice guy
Jack: Bum
Secret talent:
Keith: It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you
Jack: Drinking
Talent you wish you had:
Keith: Playing pedal steel guitar
Jack: Trust fund
Upcoming release/next record:
Keith: Hush Arbors – ‘untitled’, coming out on Ecstatic Peace records in August/September
Jack: Jack Rose and the black twig pickers
Recording process:
Keith: Guitar-vocals, then building a nice environment for the melody to relax in
Jack: I play, it gets recorded.
Last purchase:
Keith: A new jacket
Jack: Cigarettes
Ideal retirement:
Keith: Nice and peacefully somewhere by the ocean
Jack: Win the lottery
-- Pete Nicholson
keith wood/foto: pe
jack rose/foto:pe
j. rose/foto:pe
jack rose/hush arbors flyer
