Tenebrae Album

Tenebrae includes sounds one might hear on a
cylinder recording discovered in a closed-up Victorian home tucked far
off the road in the mountains somewhere. It could be Portland, Oregon,
or Portland, Maine, or the deep recesses of Western Canada. The songs
are, at times, mysterious and otherworldly, though Theo Angell's voice
retains an earthy beauty that grounds so much of his songwriting on his
previous long-players: Dearly Beloved (AMI-025) and Auraplinth (Digitalis 050).

The tunes included here are almost minimal in terms of
instrumentation, though the Tabernacle Hillside Singers include some of
the most important players in the contemporary Psych-Folk scene. Along
with labelmate P.G. Six, Tenebrae includes Samara Lubelski, Tom
Greenwood, and Matt Valentine, who help infuse Theo's songs with
British Folk, Acid Psych, and Minimalist flourishes, as heard on "Like
a Wind," "The Shadow Ring," and "Wakeling." "Tenebrae" and "Higher
Something" are both Grade A Angell, investigating his lifelong interest
in the sacred and profane. Imagine if all those road movies from the
1960s delivered something more akin to Flannery O'Connor than
Steppenwolf and one begins to understand the outsider Folk sounds Theo
provides here. Theo cites Alan Lomax's ethnomusical recordings from the
Italian mountains and countryside in the years following the Second
World War as a primary influence on his current approach to music. To
that end, the complex vocal interplay on Tenebrae references a Renaissance-vibe embedded in the rural countryside.- Amish Records