Joseph Decosimo - Fiery Gizzard - Green - VINYL LP

Old-time and traditional music stay exciting for their contrasts. Exacting instrumentation honed through mentorships and late-night jams at fiddler's conventions tangles with a community-sourced inventiveness that influences variants and new sounds. Joseph Decosimo is a master of this genre for this very reason, blending deep technique with an openness and curiosity that keep his music crackling with life. A Inchmarvelous fiddlerInch (No Depression) and banjo player who braids Inchexultation and venerationInch (INDY Week) into his music, on his third solo album Fiery Gizzard Decosimo gathers a close-knit ensemble of friends from his musical career to infuse his interpretations of fiddle and banjo pieces with a contagious communal joy.As an artist working with traditional music from the South and Appalachia, Decosimo chooses songs based not only on historical significance and lineage but also his own sensory approach. For Fiery Gizzard, his ear was tuned to otherworldly tones and mystery, sourcing from field recordings such as Virginia fiddler Luther Davis' hypnotic version of InchShady GroveInch while amping up the music's psychedelic potential. On the middle Tennessee banjo composition InchFlowery Girls,Inch a VHS of bluesman Abner Jay inspired Decosimo to rig up a pickup inside a fretless banjo and play it through a tube amp to capture some of Jay's edge and funkiness. But to round out the sound and keep it kinetic meant galvanizing a genre-eschewing crew to jam out- and not in a Inchspaced-out droolyInch kind of way, he laughs, but as a sort of Inchresponsive conversation.InchDecosimo has always been a community-minded artist. He began playing as a seventh grader in Tennessee, fostering relationships with older players at jams and in homes, a learning mode natural to his inquisitive nature and desire for musical connection. A folklorist by intuition, he later becam

In April 2021, Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, and Cleek Schrey-three of the most compelling interpreters in the American traditional music scene-gathered at a cabin in Tennessee to explore their collective repertoire of Old-time fiddle and banjo tunes, gleaned from visits with older players, field recordings, and vintage 78s. In between roaming the surrounding limestone bluffs, hunting morels, and foraging ramps, they nestled into their music and recorded themselves in the cabin-turned-studio. Working with fiddle, hardanger d'amore (a fiddle with sympathetic strings), banjos, and a 19th-century pump organ, the trio captured both the sonic details of their instruments and a generous musical interplay rooted in a dozen years of collaboration. Their debut album, Beehive Cathedral, presents resonant, thoughtful, and expansive explorations of Appalachian and American music. The results showcase deep study and enveloping, exhilarating performances. A rich vein of stories and relationships to people and places underpin Beehive Cathedral. Much of the album draws on Decosimo's experiences learning the music of Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, where he grew up and worked as a folklorist. A key source of inspiration was fiddler Clyde Davenport (1921-2020), InchClyde was a social and musical trickster who knew hundreds of old tunes and had an uncanny ability to recall each piece in exquisite detail,Inch says Decosimo. InchDuring my visits, he'd play breathtaking local pieces from his father Will, who was born in 1868. His father had learned some of them from a neighbor who was born in 1829.Inch These brushes with deep time and place inspire the trio's flowing renditions of Davenport's InchBetty Baker' and InchDrunken HiccupsInch, as well as his driving InchLost GirlInch (wherein a fierce storm can be heard in background). The whistling of Davenport's neighbor Evelyn Sharp gave

Green to Gold is the much anticipated new album from New York based, Indie/Folk band, The Antlers. Perhaps what distinguishes Green to Gold from the rest of The Antlers' canon is it's, well, sunniness. Conceived and written almost entirely in themorning hours, Green to Gold is the band's first new music in nearly seven years, and easily their most luminous to date.InchI think this is the first album I've made thathas no eeriness in it,Inch singer and primary songwriter Peter Silberman asserts. InchI setout to make Sunday morning music.InchThe brighter outlook emerged, paradoxically, after a succession of ominous events. In 2015, Silberman suffered with an auditory condition that made touring near impossible and he retreated to the quiet of Upstate New York to heal. His return in 2017 with a solo album was short lived when he was diagnosed with lesions on his vocal chords, which required surgery and again a quiet rest and recovery period. Silberman explains. InchI took these health obstacles as a sign that I should changecourse for a little while. I hadn't made a full stop like that since The Antlers began.InchBut he still felt the strong pull to spend time and work with longtime drummer Michael Lerner, and frequently invited him up to visit the idyllic hamlet he now called home. The two friends' days typically involved long walks in the woods, but routinely ended up in Silberman's converted-garage studio. InchI would record him playing drums in the studio while he listened to old soul and R&B songs in headphones... and those drum recordings ultimately served as starting points for thesongs that followed. At the time, we were merely attempting to make music together again, without really knowing how to approach it, or to what end.InchInchI think the shift in tone is the result of getting older. It doesn't make sense for me to try to tap into the same energy that I did