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If you head north on I-85 from Hillsborough, NC, and take the exit for 58 East, in fifteen minutes you'll reach Diamond Grove, a small unincorporated area in Brunswick County, Virginia on the Meherrin River. To most eyes, there's not much there-you'll have to drive to Lawrenceville for groceries or to South Hill for hardware. But hidden in this patch of Virginia piedmont are the remnants of a dairy farm established in the 1740s, it's main house an old two up, two down beauty still outfitted with rope beds and all. Go there today and you'll hear distant sounds of someone working soybeans and cotton in the leased-out outbuildings, farm-use tires grinding gravel roads, frogs peeping, and chickadees singing out chick-a-dee, chick-a-dee. But if you happened to pass through in September of 2023, you might've heard fiddle tunes ricocheting off the pines, BBs rattling-to-rest inside empties, and the sounds of Weirs recording their second LP and Dear Life Records debut Diamond Grove.Weirs is an experimental collective grown out of central North Carolina's music scene-one that is equal parts old-time and DIY noise. Non-hierarchical in form, past Weirs performances have included anywhere from two to twelve people. In September 2023, nine traveled up US-58 to pack into the living and dining rooms of the dairy farm main house, still in the family of band member and organizer Oliver Child-Lanning, whose relatives have been there for centuries. This Weirs lineup-neither definitive nor precious-includes Child-Lanning; Justin Morris and Libby Rodenbough (his collaborators in Sluice); Evan Morgan, Courtney Werner, and Mike DeVito of Magic Tuber Stringband; and stalwarts Andy McLeod, Alli Rogers, and Oriana Messer who played deep into those late-summer evenings. What resulted are the nine tracks of Diamond Grove, recorded with an ad hoc signal chain assembled from a greater-communitys
