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Seabuckthorn, “Through a Vulnerable Occur” (IIKKI Books, 2020)

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Over the last several years, it has seemed like each new Seabuckthorn release marks yet another significant creative breakthrough for Andy Cartwright. This latest one, his first for France’s IIKKI Books imprint, is intended as a multimedia “dialogue” with Australian photographer Sophie Gabrielle. Given the increasingly cinematic cast of this project, composing an accompaniment for a book of stark and striking photographs is hardly a stretch, but Cartwright’s vision has nevertheless grown even more sophisticated since last year’s Crossing. 

Much like its predecessor, Through A Vulnerable Occur showcases Cartwright’s ingenious and endlessly evolving talent for rendering his guitar largely unrecognizable as such, yet his emphasis on details, textures, and small scale dynamics is even more pronounced and masterful this time around. Given that Vulnerable Occur crosses the blurry line between melodic “songs” and more abstract soundscapes a bit more than previous releases, it admittedly took me a few listens to fully warm to it. Once I was fully immersed its rich tapestry of layers and nuances, however, Vulnerable Occur revealed itself to be a slow-burning masterpiece of elegantly controlled tension.

I am always fascinated and somewhat amazed whenever I encounter a virtuosic instrumentalist who is able to egolessly cast aside their technical prowess in pursuit of a bold new vision, such as laptop-era Jim O’Rourke or modular synth-era Cam Deas. On this latest release, Cartwright himself fully earns a place in that illustrious pantheon, as he now focuses entirely upon droning soundscapes of bowed strings rather than the rapidly picked, rolling arpeggios of his earlier days. 

Despite that ambitious transformation, a distinctive “haunted Americana” feel remains a consistent thread in Cartwright’s work and he has only gotten better at evoking a complete and fully formed world of his own (as opposed to composing work that feels like a cool soundtrack in search of a suitably bleak and arty western to accompany). A lingering trace of the former Cartwright does briefly surface in the rippling melancholy arpeggios of “While There By The Woods,” but the opening “Toward the Warmth” is far more representative of Seabuckthorn’s current aesthetic: a slow-motion reverie of swelling strings embellished with metallic sharpness and ghostly vapor trails of decay.

The most apt adjective for Cartwright’s current vision is “painterly,” as each piece feels like a wonderfully enigmatic, haunting, and masterfully composed scene. The analogy actually goes even deeper than that though, as Cartwright would be the kind of painter who mercilessly scrutinized every brush stroke to ensure that every single nuance felt meaningful, necessary, and right. While he might occasionally err on the side of too understated, Cartwright’s instincts for detail, texture, and small-scare dynamic shifts are almost supernaturally infallible (especially on the second half of this album).

The album’s centerpiece is the eerily beautiful “Other Other,” as Cartwright beautifully weaves together delicate charango arpeggios, pulsing bass tones, violin-like drones, and a spectral swirl of shimmering overtones and guitar noise. I particularly love the glimmering washes of delay-heavy harmonics that blossom in the piece’s final minutes. While the first half of Vulnerable Occur contains a few highlights of its own, such the smoldering and gently undulating title piece, “Other Other” is the turning point where the album truly catches fire in earnest. Everything that follows is great, but I am especially fond of “Copper & Indigo” and “The Sunken Room.”

In the former, a shivering bowed motif throws off sharp harmonics as heavier metallic tones hollowly heave and reverberate in the depths. In “The Sunken Room,” on the other hand, twinkling fragments of melody flutter and ripple in a gently heaving sea of blurred, anguished-sounding swells. While the simmering intensity of the album’s heavier pieces understandably tends to stand out, Cartwright also does a fine job of balancing that darkness with a bit more light than usual. 

That expanded mood palette is both welcome and effective, as the contrast adds heft to the darker moments and makes for a more immersive, nuanced, and emotionally resonant whole. The album even closes on one of those brighter notes, as “Or A Morning Blue in the East” calls to mind the sun-dappled surface of a gently rippling pond on a warm spring day. Elsewhere, the brief “Toward the Alone” is even more radiantly lovely, approximating the healing warmth of flickering sunlight filtered through a stained glass window.

Another way in which Through a Vulnerable Occur is like a painting is that its full beauty and depth take some time to reveal themselves, much like a mysterious scene whose meaning can only be unlocked by noticing a crucial detail or the subtleties of a facial expression. Obviously, listening with headphones helped immensely in fully immersing myself in Cartwright’s vision, yet once I was drawn into its vivid details I could not stop finding other fresh aspects to fall in love with.

I suppose the album works best when Cartwright combines his textural genius with some more overtly melodic themes, as he does on “Other Other,” but the lion’s share of what I love about the album lies in the gnarled physicality of the bowed strings, the delicate dance of harmonics and overtones, and the way the pieces twist and undulate like living entities. While I am not sure Vulnerable Occur necessarily tops the best moments on my previous favorite Seabuckthorn album (A House With Too Much Fire), it definitely feels like a stronger whole and a more perfectly realized vision.

In fact, this album is exactly what I have been in the mood for recently and there is nothing else that quite scratches the same itch as this strain of simmering and subtly blackened rural psychedelia. As much as I love some other drone-inspired and experimentally minded psych-folk visionaries like The Anaksimandros, Kemialliset Ystävät, and Enhet för fri musik, none share anything quite like Cartwright’s unwavering focus and talent for sustained, smoldering intensity. I am thrilled that his years of tireless creative evolution finally led him to this place, as Vulnerable Occur feels like the album where Seabuckthorn has finally found its true home.

Samples can be found here.

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Seabuckthorn, “Crossing” (Eilean, 2019)

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English guitarist Andy Cartwright’s A House With Too Much Fire was one of the most striking and underappreciated albums of 2018, beautifully evoking a timeless and haunted-sounding strain of Americana. For his follow-up, the expectant father arguably allows a bit more light to creep into his vision, but plunges still deeper into the more experimental and atmospheric tendencies that made Too Much Fire so wonderful. In fact, Crossing sheds many of the more overt folk trappings of its predecessor, largely replacing the banjos and acoustic guitars with drones from a bowed resonator guitar (though the “Haunted Americana” sensibility remains very firmly in place). 

Despite its strong emphasis on mood and sustained tones, however, it would be a mistake to characterize Crossing as anything like a conventional drone album, as Cartwright’s closest kindred spirit at this stage of his career seems to be Richard Skelton. It does not quite resemble the actual Richard Skelton though—instead Crossing often approximates an alternate Skelton who veered towards increasingly warm, intimate, and bittersweet soundscapes rather than embracing the deeper themes and elemental power of the natural world. I certainly have ample room in my heart for both directions, especially when executed this masterfully.

I was pleasantly amazed when I first learned that Crossing was primarily composed for guitar (albeit an unconventionally played one), as the opening title piece feels very convincingly like the work of a full string quartet. I knew that it was possible to approximate a violin with a bowed guitar, but Cartwright somehow manages to conjure up the richly woody and rattling moans of a double bass as well. That textural wizardry and attentive devotion to sound design is a large part of what makes Seabuckthorn such a compelling project these days, as Cartwright is a master at finding the perfect balance between the ghostly and the visceral.

Moreover, he applies those production talents to a distinctive, immersive, and bleakly beautiful vision. For me, that vision evokes clouds slowly rolling across the horizon of a desolate prairie in the 1800s. Consequently, I was also surprised to find that Crossing was composed in the French Alps, as it genuinely feels like it was dreamed up on the back porch of a ramshackle cabin in Joshua Tree by a grizzled hermit plagued by religious visions. That sense of stark, lonely beauty pervades much of the album and provides its ostensible center, as the darkly churning strings of the opener are reprised for two more movements of a “Crossing” trilogy (as well as the brooding coda of the closing “Crossed”). Along the way, however, the clouds occasionally part to reveal some gorgeously sublime oases of flickering light and deep emotion.Those moments are where Crossing shines the brightest.

By my count, there are three absolute stunners among Crossing‘s fourteen songs: “To Which the Rest Were Dreamt,” “The After Quiet,” and “It Can Ashen.” In “The Rest Were Dreamt,” pulsing feedback-like harmonics form a slow, tender melody while fading in and out of focus like ghosts. “The After Quiet” takes a similarly pulsing approach to melody, but beautifully tweaks the formula by adding a shivering, squealing, and undulating layer of bowed strings. On “It Can Ashen,” on the other hand, a sleepily lovely clarinet melody endlessly repeats like an enigmatic bird song over a densely churning bed of heavy drones.

There is also a second tier of excellent pieces that are quite striking as well, such as “The Cloud and the Redness,” which nicely embellishes its slow-moving drones with vibrantly squeaking and squirming bowed strings that slice through the ambient haze. The mournful, banjo-driven “Cleanse” is yet another wonderful piece, though it is a bit of an outlier that returns to the territory of A House With Too Much Fire. To my ears, its slow-motion, rustic country blues is a dark horse candidate for Crossing‘s most inspired and revelatory piece, even if it is not the album’s strongest composition. It feels like God himself had a bit too much whiskey, got all melancholy, and decided to play some sad bottleneck slide guitar on his porch. The playing itself is not particularly god-like, but the scale certainly feels like it, as Cartwright’s sliding chords feel glacial and immense in a way that is not human. It is both weirdly meditative and eerily hallucinatory and it resembles nothing else that I have ever heard.

Even though some of the most achingly gorgeous moments on A House With Too Much Fire were the more abstract ones, I did not expect Cartwright as far away from the virtuosic fingerpicking of his early work as he does with this release. He is a hell of a gifted guitarist, yet anyone who encounters Seabuckthorn for the first time with Crossing could certainly be forgiven for not realizing that there were guitars on it. I suppose that makes Crossing a culminating achievement of sorts, as Cartwright has now definitively transformed from a guitarist with a flair for the cinematic into a gifted composer who is chasing a sublime and hauntingly impressionist vision (and succeeding). 

In that regard, Cartwright continues to roughly mirror the trajectory of his former label mate William Ryan Fritch: both are talented multi-instrumentalists increasingly in demand for film scores and both have a pronounced fondness for a evoking a mythic American West. Their sole major divergence is that Fritch is far more prolific and stylistically varied (and that he makes it seem effortless). Cartwright, on the other hand, seems like the sort of artist who will spend years devotedly straining to attain the one vision that obsesses him. In both cases, the end result is the same: plenty of excellent music and an occasional glimpse of almost unearthly beauty. 

When Cartwright is at his best (as he sometimes is here), it feels like he is on an entirely different plane than most other composers. I am not sure if Crossing necessarily surpasses Too Much Fire or merely maintains the same level of greatness, but it does not matter, as both albums fitfully capture an incandescent brilliance that can rarely be found elsewhere.

Samples can be found here.

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Seabuckthorn, “A House With Too Much Fire” (Bookmaker Records/La Cordillère, 2018)

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For some reason, this long-running project from English guitarist Andy Cartwright has stayed largely under my radar until now, despite my occasional brushes with his work through various blogs and his splits with Dean McPhee and Loscil. This latest release, Seabuckthorn’s ninth, is deeply influenced by Cartwright’s rustic and mountainous new surroundings in the Southern Alps, yet his work has always had an earthy, widescreen grandeur. 

As I am only casually familiar with the rest of the Seabuckthorn oeuvre, I cannot confidently state that Cartwright’s new environment or recent focus on textural experimentation have radically transformed his work, but A House With Too Much Fire definitely feels like an especially strong showing. Much like the aforementioned McPhee, Cartwright has carved out a sublime and alternately haunting and gorgeous niche all his own, far transcending my expectations of what a lone guitarist can achieve (though Cartwright certainly embraces a much more expansive palette than his peers).

I am not quite sure what I expected from this album, but I am absolutely certain that whatever vague expectations I had were either transcended or outright wrong. This is quite a curious and fascinating album to try to wrap my head around, as Cartwright seems to be equal parts visionary and chameleon. It is easy to see how Seabuckthorn acquired such a devoted cult following over the years though, as Cartwright’s inspiration burns quite brightly during the album’s best moments, occasionally calling to mind the timeless, elemental power of prime Richard Skelton. 

More often, however, Cartwright feels like a kindred spirit to iconoclastic American composer and Lost Tribe label mate William Ryan Fritch, as the two artists channel very similar strains of melancholy and cinematic Americana (though Fritch is considerably more eclectic these days). Along with Aaron Martin and Western Skies Motel, the two seem like the incipient vanguard of an unnamed movement that I will tentatively dub The Haunted West which inventively blurs the lines between folk, modern composition, and atmospheric post-rock a la Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky. 

The finest example of that vein on A House With Too Much Fire is probably “It Was Aglow,” which unfolds as a mournful cascade of banjo arpeggios that casts off a spark-like spray of spectral, delay-heavy ripples. “What The Shepherds Call Ghosts” is similarly dazzling, as Cartwright unleashes a roiling web of rapidly picked arpeggios as a gently plucked melody winds its way through a rattling and moaning gauntlet of tormented strings. If the whole album had expanded that aesthetic into a focused vision, A House With Too Much Fire would likely be a stone-cold masterpiece. The rest of the album occasionally does delve further into that theme beautifully (the title piece, “Sent in by the Cold,” etc.), yet Cartwright’s mercurial muse led him in some other interesting directions as well, resulting in a bit more of a complicated and shifting affair.

In some cases, Cartwright’s divergence from the expected path pays off beautifully, as the slowly churning string elegy of “Somewhat Like Vision” burrows even deeper into the past to evoke a deep, primeval sadness that predates anything resembling America. Elsewhere, “Disentangled” is a foray into languorous and lyrical Eastern-tinged desert blues. “Figure Afar” is yet another departure of sorts, as Cartwright sets aside his guitar and banjo for a churning reverie of mournful bowed strings. 

Unfortunately, there is also one perplexing misstep that continues to mystify me: “Inner.” It is not necessarily a bad piece, though it admittedly errs on the side of meandering and improvisatory-sounding. The more significant issue is the strange decision to include a gently burbling and plodding synth backdrop, which transforms an otherwise unmemorable interlude into something that breaks the album’s timeless and hallucinatory spell and unceremoniously drops me back in the present. 

Thankfully, Cartwright’s rare dubious decisions are completely eclipsed by everything that he does exactly right, as my appreciation for House deepens with each fresh listen. In particular, I am struck the sheer craftsmanship and intuitive genius for texture and dynamics displayed on pieces like “Somewhat Like Vision,” as Cartwright has the nuance and lightness of touch to weave a dreamlike state, yet also grasps exactly when to allow a crucial note to viscerally carve through the mist. He also brings a deep soul and quiet intensity to his vision, as these pieces do not just evoke desolate prairies and forgotten towns like a soundtrack composer might. Instead, Cartwright conjures imagined places that feel pregnant with enough mystery and hidden meaning to linger in my mind long after the album has ended.

A House With Too Much Fire is quietly beguiling in deeper, more abstract ways as well. For example, Cartwright has reached a Zen-like plane of casual virtuosity in which the desire to compose something beautiful supplants any ego-driven need to showcase his playing (a feat that is all too rare among technically proficient musicians). When a piece calls for it, Cartwright is certainly game to unleash a dazzling and intricate flurry of notes, but he is just as content to craft a slow-moving and impressionistic scene from ghostly smears of harmonics, feedback, and string drones (“Blackout”). 

On a larger scale, I am also quite impressed with Cartwright’s vision in general, as he deftly avoids crossing the blurry line that would make House feel like at all like a soundtrack (though “Submerged Past” errs on that side). For the most part, however, A House With Too Much Fire never feels like an imagined accompaniment to a film in Cartwright’s mind. Rather, it feels like it is that film. The difference is subtle, I suppose, but it has massive implications when it comes to how much I love an album and I mostly love this one. It is not quite a perfect whole, yet the highlights are legitimately amazing: pieces like “It was Aglow” and “Somewhat Like Vision” masterfully weave vividly realized worlds that swirl with beauty, mystery, and ineffable sadness.

Samples can be found here.