https://american-dreams.zone American Dreams Records Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:23:04 +0000 https://american-dreams.zone en https://american-dreams.zone/Artists-1 Sat, 14 Aug 2021 10:51:30 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Artists-1 12 Rods9T AntiopeAaron Turner &amp; Jon MuellerAlex Zhang HungtaiAndrée BurelliAnti-God HandThe Ark of TeethBaldi/Gerycz DuoBlue LickBrett NauckeCameron KnowlerCameron Knowler &amp; Eli WinterCivic CenterClaire RousayDaniel WycheDevin ShafferDorothy CarlosEli Winterevicshen Forest ManagementGerycz/Powers/RolinIbisesJon MuellerJordan ReyesKyle KiddLea Bertucci &amp; Lawrence EnglishLawrence English &amp; Stephen VitielloLesley MokLia KohlLucy LiyouMANASMarvin Tate’s D-SettlementMatthew J. RolinMute DuoNatalie Rose LeBrechtNick ZancaONOOssemaanPale SpringPatrick ShiroishiragenapRESRobbie BennettShovel Dance CollectiveSiavash AminiSunk HeaventravisTomuWalt McClementsWendy Eisenberg Yuko ArakiZohraZRL https://american-dreams.zone/Yuko-Araki-artist-page Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:23:04 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Yuko-Araki-artist-page <img width="801" height="1200" width_o="801" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8068279a416f8645c3f3c083fc5c338c1fefb124da5a3de5cdfdd8b6af1ee9a3/0036356560_10.jpg" data-mid="253744653" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/801/i/8068279a416f8645c3f3c083fc5c338c1fefb124da5a3de5cdfdd8b6af1ee9a3/0036356560_10.jpg" /> Yuko Araki American Dreams Releases: V “I have always been interested,” says Japanese noise artist Yuko Araki, “in the idea that noise can become more musical.” V, the sixth album in her numbered series and first American Dreams release, brings that idea to life, shunting high-wire coruscations of noise into songs that carve out space between club music, post-industrial electronics, and extreme music.V emerged in the midst of a hundred tour dates spanning Japan, the UK, continental Europe, Indonesia and China, but it’s rooted in the interplay of sounds from Araki’s adopted hometown of Tokyo. Araki distills the intensity of acts like Hanatarash through composition, rhythm, structures and musicality. Ideas that first emerged on her releases IV and Zenjitsutan now push her music into yet darker territory. How can harsh noise, rhythm, bass and composition coexist without breaking down a song? How to push the borders of what constitutes a song without destroying its structural integrity? These are among the questions V seeks to answer, using Eurorack synthesizer systems that Araki designed to include randomizers, random voltage generators, and samplers.Like on her recent releases, Araki began by composing and designing sounds on a laptop. Then, she forced her sounds through her Eurorack systems, crushed them, and rebuilt them into piercing textures that walk the line between dancefloor propulsion and outright chaos. Lead single “Decoded Void,” which emerged when Araki supported the band SUMAC in Tokyo in 2025, the fearsome “Lost Invocation,” or “Guttural Shrapnel,” which closes the record, are emblematic of Araki’s approach. These corral explosions of noise into verse-chorus song structures, deploying voice samples while melodic textures collapse and regenerate around them, as if dance songs at the edge of the world. Even so, the album leaves room for playfulness; “Hell and Death” is named after Araki’s cats.V represents Araki’s work at its sharpest edge, bringing together the ferocity of her live performances and thoroughness of her compositions, resulting in her most aggressive, intense, heaviest record to date. https://american-dreams.zone/MANAS-artist-page Sat, 12 Sep 2026 19:59:01 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/MANAS-artist-page <img width="1554" height="1000" width_o="1554" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/45cad27330a82e502f0ef7451d56548861ea3cc2b275c46d6554ffb2a3464b16/IMG_7977.png" data-mid="252098821" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/45cad27330a82e502f0ef7451d56548861ea3cc2b275c46d6554ffb2a3464b16/IMG_7977.png" /> MANAS American Dreams Releases:The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid Since 2012, MANAS, the improvising duo of Asheville's Tashi Dorji (guitar) and Thom Nguyen (drums), has forged a path of fearless, intuitive improvisation, drawing from free jazz, noise, punk, and experimental music. The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid balances the explosive energy of their concerts with attention to texture and form, creating music that is at once volatile, spacious, and collaborative.MANAS conceptualized the album as a score for 100 Sunset, the award-winning feature film debut from Tibetan-Canadian director Kunsang Kyirong, at her invitation. As the band entered the studio — an herbal apothecary called Ritual Botanica, tucked alongside the French Broad River, one of the oldest rivers in the world — they decided to approach the music with a new emphasis on space, repetition and restraint, building song structures in real time.With structural unity, the pair achieve sonic unity to a degree we have never before heard from them — immediately apparent on the album's propulsive opening track, "100 sunset," which Kyirong's film uses as a main theme. Here, the tonality of Dorji’s guitar preparations and sharp-edged attack makes his guitar sound like both itself and like Nguyen’s kit, and Nguyen’s bass drums are tuned in the key of Dorji’s guitar. The structure emerges from nothing, like traveling in the desert and realizing a mirage is an oasis, on “For the Wild.” Sound accumulates like tide crashing into shoreline on “Dreams of Durdak,” and “destituons le monde” is raucous, stormy, like a circling hurricane’s eye. Often, Dorji keeps time while Nguyen ranges free, and their instruments appear to merge.The forty-third verse of the Tao Te Ching says that “the most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid,” and the emptiest the most full. “From this,” Lao Tzu writes, "comes a lesson — stillness benefits more than action. Silence benefits more than words." Here, MANAS synthesize his wisdom: stillness and space coexist with attunement and heightened presence. "Improvised music, this music-making in the immediacy and now, in the moment," Dorji says, "feels way more radical than anything I've ever done. Making improvised music and creating radical music with the intention of opening people’s ears.”Amidst his trailblazing improvising career, which spans countless solo and collaborative concerts and LPs — including with Efrim Manuel Manuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Susie Ibarra, and criminally underrated Chicago drummer Tyler Damon — Dorji describes MANAS as "a kinship,” “a brotherhood,” “rhizomatic.” And much like a rhizome in nature, The most yielding thing... unfolds organically, a thrilling release of great natural beauty. https://american-dreams.zone/Robbie-Bennett-artist-page Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:26:48 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Robbie-Bennett-artist-page https://american-dreams.zone/Siavash-Amini-Eugene-Thacker-artist-page Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:12:12 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Siavash-Amini-Eugene-Thacker-artist-page <img width="2000" height="1200" width_o="2000" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bec258e03fa15cdcdc6f3932b84b537b9d48cad2ccd9344f6b24d02d6715550b/sa-et2.png" data-mid="250409731" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bec258e03fa15cdcdc6f3932b84b537b9d48cad2ccd9344f6b24d02d6715550b/sa-et2.png" /> Siavash Amini &amp; Eugene Thacker American Dreams Releases: Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III Siavash Amini is a composer from Tehran, Iran.&nbsp; He has worked with the labels Room40, Hallow Ground, American Dreams Records, Opal Tapes, and Umor Rex for more than a decade. He also has collaborated with a wide range of international artists, including Rafael Anton Irisarri, 9T Antiope, Heinali and Zenjungle as well as the poet and scholar Eugene Thacker. He has remixed tracks for Carl Craig, Bernard Szajner, LTO, worriedaboutsatan and the duo Arigto among many others. He has performed at CTM festival, MUTEKes, Silent Night Prague and many other well-known international venues and events. He is a co-founder of “SET experimental art events” and “SETfest” in Tehran, Iran.Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet and Infinite Resignation. He teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Born and raised in the Seattle area, he currently lives in Brooklyn. siavashamini.bandcamp.com eugenethacker.com On Songs for Sad Poets Vol. III, Tehran composer Siavash Amini and Brooklyn author Eugene Thacker present lyrics sung by voices, but which are unrecognizable as words – and unintelligible even as voices. The album is an ongoing collaboration inspired by the tradition of “cursed poets” (poètes maudits), following Amini and Thacker’s 2022 double album for Hallow Ground, Songs for Sad Poets Vol. I. Vol. III pays tribute to Hàn Mặc Tử, who founded Vietnam’s “Chaos” (Loạn) school of poetry; João da Cruz e Sousa, the leading figure of Brazilian Symbolist poetry in the late 1800s; and Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, an influential figure in the literary tradition of “worldweariness” (Weltschmerz). Writing for chorus, Thacker’s compressed poetry allows words to undergo sonic transformations. Amini transforms Thacker’s minimalist poetry into spectral and haunting soundscapes. After programming voice synthesis software to perform Thacker’s poems, Amini layered up to forty voices at a time, processing them until their vocal signposts diffuse and dissolve. Song and sound implode and become indistinguishable from each other, at once lyrical and abstract. https://american-dreams.zone/Alex-Zhang-Hungtai-artist-page Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:09:32 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Alex-Zhang-Hungtai-artist-page <img width="2141" height="2449" width_o="2141" height_o="2449" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/35840e191506d49df7c954ae87b4ef74dcaf57d72d4610efd7df8dbeda9481cb/IMG_5960.jpeg" data-mid="247513517" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/35840e191506d49df7c954ae87b4ef74dcaf57d72d4610efd7df8dbeda9481cb/IMG_5960.jpeg" /> Alex Zhang Hungtai American Dreams Releases: Orion / Mother Alex Zhang Hungtai's new double album Orion/Mother, a brave, gigantic burst of life, creativity, and abstract balladry, alchemizes the past and the present, sampling home recordings he made with some of New York’s finest improvisers while spontaneously composing on top of them with trumpet and other instruments. It’s the sound of an artist addressing unresolved fragments from his past, integrating them into the present, and building a new path.“The major contributor to the completion of this double album,” Zhang says, “is the removal of doubt.” For two weeks, during a period of intense personal transition, Zhang wrote and recorded at a rehearsal space, working regimented, full days in the dead of a long brutal New York winter. Inspired by Butch Morris’ method of directing improvisation called conduction, Zhang revisited rehearsal recordings he’d made years before with various New York improvising musicians. He created an ad-hoc group - including percussionist Che Chen, Korean Gong resonator experimentalist Leo Chang, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, flautist Laura Cox, cellist Lester St. Louis, noise artist Kwami Winfield, and tap dancer Melissa Almaguer - using Ableton to cut and match all the different sessions together. Zhang improvised with trumpet over live samples of the chopped sessions, bringing these past recordings to the present moment. You can hear overlapping snippets of his saxophone, drums and voice experimentations from the rehearsal recordings via sampling, whilst the trumpet had then become the “grounding force” and conceptual narrator of Orion/Mother, allowing Zhang to decontextualize, process, and reconcile with the past through abstract lyricism in the present.As Orion/Mother unfolds, Zhang’s trumpet flies above thrumming electronics (“Earth Orbit”), navigates percussion strikes (“Mother”), communes with explosive sounds (“Sidewinder”), or melts into silence (“Tannhäuser Gate”). Just as Zhang uncovered the album’s scope over those two weeks in New York, the album communicates discovery, friendship, community, and attunement. “The music,” he says, “sounds like something that was dormant is starting to awaken.” Here, indeed, is a new being, a new approach to making music, and a new music itself, borne of ingenuity and attention. https://american-dreams.zone/Lawrence-English-Stephen-Vitiello-artist-page Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:46:47 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Lawrence-English-Stephen-Vitiello-artist-page <img width="1100" height="825" width_o="1100" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b28fe223ed5b2c17c04791ae42dcae79e6ebcabaaab69002ebacb209100d9052/JPEG-image.jpeg" data-mid="238560313" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b28fe223ed5b2c17c04791ae42dcae79e6ebcabaaab69002ebacb209100d9052/JPEG-image.jpeg" /> Lawrence English &amp; Stephen Vitiello American Dreams Releases: Trinity Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator—one per track—to map new territories. Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.Trinity has a trick up its sleeve, a surprise. In English’s words, “this record’s surprise was the invitation of a third player.” Its opening track, which features Australian iconoclast Chris Abrahams on piano, drops us right in the middle of the action. His piano, Vitiello says, “floats in and above our bed of sounds,” structuring their warp and weft. But as “With Chris" unfurls, Abrahams’ piano takes a darker hue and moves beneath the lead artists’ bed of sounds, which whispers and gnashes, grasping yet withholding. It’s a microcosm for the album, like looking at a Pointillist painting: pellucid as a whole.The flip side of the coin is the album’s second single, “With Brendan,” featuring legendary punk drummer Brendan Canty. Here, we hear English and Vitiello's gifts for treating music as a sculptural material, and drawing chameleonic permutations from their collaborators. Mixed amidst soft layers of drones that hover just above, Canty’s formidable backbeat teeters on the edge, as if, responding to his collaborators, he might disintegrate the beat or pull it out of phase.“With each of our collaborations,” English says, “Stephen and I have tried to unlock something unexpected, and for us at least, new.” As individual artists, English and Vitiello each use sound as an artistic medium, making site-specific installations and multi-channel works. And, working remotely between Australia and America, English and Vitiello have a long history of playful experimentation. On their past albums—2011’s Acute Inbetweens and 2014’s Fable—English and Vitiello have reveled in modular synthesis, field recordings, and the porous boundaries between a given sound and its distance from the source. Across Trinity’s five pieces, the pair and their collaborators plunge the listener into dynamic, floral worlds that are warm, enigmatic and spacious.Steve Roden, credited on Trinity's final track as playing electronics and “mystery sounds,” died of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2023. His contributions are delicate and soft, yet among the album’s most vigorous: we hear guitar harmonics, gentle notes, strokes like a violin bow. It's a fitting coda to an open-minded album, which invites us to lean in close to the mystery and listen for what we might each find. https://american-dreams.zone/Fuubutsushi-artist-page Tue, 06 May 2025 01:07:27 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Fuubutsushi-artist-page <img width="1100" height="825" width_o="1100" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3bcb6b421da97faa1ee4831c5ab84d8afb9d33a820d564da9919e36d3eb859d4/images.disco.jpg" data-mid="232830096" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3bcb6b421da97faa1ee4831c5ab84d8afb9d33a820d564da9919e36d3eb859d4/images.disco.jpg" /> Fuubutsushi American Dreams Releases: Columbia Deluxe Columbia Deluxe imbues Fuubutsushi’s music with the electricity of playing for a crowd. Borne of the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group prepared countless releases remotely from around the country. Columbia Deluxe expands compositions collected from across the band’s body of work, from their earliest releases to their 2024 LP Meridians, translating their careful arrangements into live performance. All four time zones of the continental US are represented in the group's membership: Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh), Matthew Sage (Colorado Front Range), and Chaz Prymek (Salt Lake City). It’s fitting given the musical landscapes that it surveys, which are dynamic, warm, and both energetic and rewarding of patience. The band has heightened these qualities on Columbia Deluxe.“The music of Fuubutsushi,” Prymek says, “started as a recording project that turned into deep friendships.” After composing music remotely for their acclaimed cycle of four albums for each of the four seasons, the quartet transformed the music in concert at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival (to this day Fuubutsushi’s only live appearance): Shiroishi on saxophones and field recordings, Jusell on violin, Sage on piano and synthesizer, and Prymek on guitar and bass, sharing bells, voice and electronics as a group. “I think we were all pretty nervous about it,” says Shiroishi, “but the audience was with us the entire time and really gave us an incredible amount of energy.” “Part of the thrill,” says Sage, “was that we knew the songs separately, kind of on our own terms. And how it felt to finally turn this music, which we made in such a physically isolated way, to finally come into being in person, for a really receptive audience in a really beautiful room.”There’s a punk ethos at the music’s heart that refracts the group’s stylistic diversity. Jusell has a foundation in classical music, chamber music and pop. As a solo artist and member of The Armed, Shiroishi is rooted in jazz, heavy music, and the places where they intersect. Prymek’s chordal fingerstyle guitar vocabulary, and Sage’s openness to experimentation in music and intermedia art, ground the compositions while giving them room for the band to lift off. As Prymek says, “we’re influenced by everything, but especially by each other.”“Now,” says Prymek, “what you hear out of us is that energy spilling back into our music.” It flows seamlessly from one song to the next, giving the band room to range while maintaining structure. “Bolted Orange” runs just over three minutes on the band’s self-titled debut album: here the band expands it to ten, blossoming, like the first half of the album, around Prymek’s winding, circular guitar lines. Guitar introduces that song and “Shepherd’s Stroll,” followed by declarative piano from Sage. Saxophone and violin either outline the chordal instruments’ color or push them in new directions. In keeping with past releases, the band incorporates field recordings of Japanese Americans talking about their experience in American internment camps during WWII into the music, inviting listeners to confront the past, present and future.Columbia Deluxe is intimate on the surface, and shot through with the thrill of creative risk-taking. Midway through “Shepherd’s Stroll,” with no warning, after developing the composition with dusky, spacious fingerstyle guitar, Prymek moves to bass guitar, pulling out a lumberjack riff. In response, Jusell’s violin soars, repeating a striking, elliptical double-stopped melody. The music swells even more with Shiroishi’s saxophone, as if time-traveling from Western soundtracks to impressions of French court music to—on “Mistral”—gospel time-stretched and zoomed-in. Sage oscillates the song between gigantic chords and rubato arpeggios, during which the song’s structure threatens to give way. Through barely perceptible differences in pitch and tonality, Shiroishi and Jusell keep it together by controlling the chaos.The energy Prymek describes is nearly palpable here, and the music transformed: a “pure manifestation” (Jusell) of unfolding “joy, stumbles, getting up and pushing forward together” (Shiroishi). As Prymek says, “we are making something forever blooming anew,” and it continues to bloom. https://american-dreams.zone/The-Ark-of-Teeth-artist-page Tue, 01 Oct 2024 01:25:49 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/The-Ark-of-Teeth-artist-page <img width="3584" height="2240" width_o="3584" height_o="2240" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ae051e3254e3afe79e914e23716df8f5f230258ce65ebeab69aa016023d83a9/unnamed.png" data-mid="218995488" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9ae051e3254e3afe79e914e23716df8f5f230258ce65ebeab69aa016023d83a9/unnamed.png" /> The Ark of Teeth American Dreams Releases: Untitled Two thousand five hundred people watched Mary the Elephant die on September 16, 1916. Four days prior she killed her inexperienced handler Red Eldridge, one day after being hired on. Upon the handler’s death, onlookers began chanting “Let’s kill it,” prompting locals to fire rounds upon the animal with little effect. Unwilling to call it quits, the circus transported her to the Clinchfield Railroad Yard where she was hanged by the neck with an industrial derrick – except the chain broke, and Mary broke her hips as she crashed to the Earth. Then they did it again and the chain didn’t break. A veterinarian examining her corpse found an infected tooth precisely where Eldridge prodded her with a hook before she attacked him. What happened to the children watching? Did the execution become a lighthouse in internal cartography – cruelty gone luminescent, drifting fog-like, settling on any and all uncovered locales?I’ve been trying to forget the word “cruel” since I learned it, and I’m fucking failing.I’m missing a word from everyone else’s dictionary, and this would all make sense if I had it. Did you know that the most recent common ancestor between human beings and octopi was 750 million years ago? It was a primitive flatworm. The way that cephalopod intelligence developed is entirely independent from that of primates, and there must have been some misunderstanding – clearly they put an octopus brain into my human flesh-casing. Maybe that’s why I always bump into things, why in my mind’s eye my shoulders run an inch-and-a-half narrower, why I feel this tug seaward each time I turn South.I love to sing. I think I made experimental music because I wanted an exoskeleton. The experiment was how many shields could I use to hide myself because singing – I mean really singing – is scary. I’m not happy with carapace-wearing songs.I made this album with some of my best friends at La Frette Studios outside Paris. Nick, Lucy, Brad, Ambre, travis, Patrick, Anthony, and Sammy helped me give myself permission to make what I really love, what I’ve always wanted to make – songs. I owe them so much.And like that – with a bit of love – the nautilus began to emerge from its shell. https://american-dreams.zone/Shovel-Dance-Collective-artist-page Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:35:36 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Shovel-Dance-Collective-artist-page <img width="1200" height="1200" width_o="1200" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da3aa68c13cb22c3195a687e1afcdb0be6c70308a73f6dace9f5307bde664dcc/0036721105_10.jpg" data-mid="215898716" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/da3aa68c13cb22c3195a687e1afcdb0be6c70308a73f6dace9f5307bde664dcc/0036721105_10.jpg" /> The Shovel Dance American Dreams Releases: The Shovel Dance The Shovel Dance, the second LP from London's nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective, is their most powerful release to date, bringing studio fidelity and trickery to the rich arrangements and soaring vocals of their concerts. While their work has always had an inventive bent, The Shovel Dance unifies the band’s experimentation with their live immediacy. Indeed, what sets The Shovel Dance apart is the Collective itself. The album revolves around their interplay and close listening, no matter how many members of the band play on a given song or how many instruments feature (there are twenty-five instruments and eight voices). The band are attentive to the English, Irish and Scottish sources they reference, which date back to the 1600s and beyond. At the same time, they give their arrangements an experimental edge—as close to Scott Walker or Swans as Shirley Collins or Bert Lloyd—that situates them on the bleeding edge of folk music.“It clicked immediately when we first played together,” the band says. It traces its origins to Daniel S. Evans playing card games and tunes with Alex McKenzie and Joshua Barfoot. “Somehow,” the band says, “we always reached together towards the sublime. This was before there was a folk scene for young weirdos like ourselves.” The group grew naturally into its nine-piece membership—which, in addition to Evans, McKenzie and Barfoot, includes Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Oliver Hamilton, Tom Hardwick-Allan, and the group’s lead vocalists, Nick Granata and Mataio Austin Dean. Together, they landed on central ideas to explore as Shovel Dance Collective. Within their aesthetic commitment to acoustic instruments, “we want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” the group says. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.”These recordings have a confidence honed through the band’s tireless performance schedule across Europe. Take the “Abbots Bromley Horn Dance,” which leads off The Shovel Dance. Traditionally, it’s a celebratory dance for ten people, with ancient reindeer antlers and a hobby horse, and two musicians playing accordion and triangle. The band extends it into a four-part instrumental doom folk proclamation, waxing and waning between birdsong and a quiet minor-key meditation that builds into a lush, roiling crescendo. Then the bottom falls out into silence, and a quiet pipe organ introduces “The Worms Crept Out,” a World War I song about a decomposing body, as Granata sings. This is as much the album’s opening track as a musical mission statement for the band: first, folk music is living, even—or especially—when it’s about death. And interpreting folk music with emotion and present-day musical textures connects the music to its forebears. Nowhere is this more true than on "The Four Loom Weaver." Performed unaccompanied by Austin Dean, the song inhabits the perspective of a weaver who’s lost his job to steam-powered weaving machines, reduced by his poverty to eating nettles. A fellow weaver, afraid to confront their boss, says, “We might have better luck if we’d just hold our tongues.” The speaker responds, “I’ve holden my tongue ’til I near lost my breath, and I feel in my own heart I’ll soon clem [or starve] to death.” As Austin Dean moves between quiet vocal fry and the top of his baritone, he imbues the music with a piercing sense of familiarity connecting the past and the present, transcending space and time. “By having this spatio-temporal sense of folk music,” the group says, “we can reject a linear time, and promote new ways of looking at land and history to highlight the struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere.“Shovel Dance Collective are among several working bands that function as a leaderless collective, but they’re unique for the beauty, force, and political charge of their folk music. “Folk music,” the band says, “places you in a great chain of everyday life, and how it can relate so intimately to political and emotional actions, past and present.” And what's more, “it infers a beautiful collectivity.” The Shovel Dance brings the band’s collectivity to its fullest realization yet.