Jacken Elswyth: The Banjo Maker

At Fargrounds feels like one possible culmination of my practice so far, marking the place I’ve found myself reaching while getting to know my instrument and its repertoire,” says London-based banjo player Jacken Elswyth of her latest album. “It brings together tunes I’ve been playing for a long time, and some I’ve picked up more recently, plus a set of semi-spontaneous improvisations with accompaniments, building on the shruti drone that I use to take my arrangements in radically new directions.”

Such intrepidness plays an integral role in all Elswyth’s artistic projects – from her inspired high-concept solo releases and involvement with the ever-compelling Shovel Dance Collective, to her instrument-building and curation of the Betwixt & Between imprint. With an adventurous approach to music-making mirroring remarkably catholic tastes (during our conversation she namechecks American Primitive guitarists John Fahey and Robbie Basho, free-improvisers Rhodri Davies and Joëlle Léandre, fellow forward-thinking banjoist Nathan Bowles, as well as avant-metallers Sunn O))) and Nadja), she boldly refuses to reverence tradition like a cache of holy relics waiting to be wheeled out at the next folk revival.

“I’m really motivated by a sense of continuation, of picking something up and moving forwards with it,” Elswyth elaborates. “Musicians need to actively engage with folk music in this way, allowing artists to preserve and progress at the same time. We’re all pitching in with an ongoing process, rather than restarting something that has stalled. That’s certainly what I hope I’m doing.”

With its animated juxtapositions of revised old standards and atomised abstracts peeling back the constraining flesh on customary clawhammer-style rhythms, At Fargrounds breathes fresh life into the instrumental folk form. Elswyth gives it further energy through her deft use of extended techniques (bow and pick) and an approach to extemporisation informed by fluid tune-playing (“the traditional leads the improvisational, rather than vice versa”). These profound aspects of her craft are cultured by Elswyth’s home-building (a process imaginatively documented on the absorbing 2021 album, Banjo with the Sound of Its Own Making), fostering an intimate bond between instrument and player.

“Making my own banjos has helped me think of them in a more dynamic way,” she explains. “Now that I have built a few I feel I’ve a much clearer awareness of string tension and its interaction with the skin, and the ways that together they shape the banjo’s sound. It’s helped me to incorporate different approaches into my playing, to view the banjo less as fixed and stable, and more as a moveable frame, supporting tensioned, resonating elements with which I’m interacting.”

At Fargrounds also reflects Elswyth’s deep-seated fascination for sustained tones, a love affair ignited by the long-form psychedelic experiments of the 90s New Weird America underground and UK psych-noise outliers such as Michael Flower, Ashtray Navigations and Vibracathedral Orchestra, with the album preserving the pulsating throb of her previous solo outings, dropping hypnotic tonal accompaniment on tracks such as the chiming ‘Lost Gander’ and gloriously dissonant ‘Who Remembers’.

“I was already interested in slow, drone-ish music when I started listening to folk music and, with the banjo, the drone is inescapable anyway, as its fifth string insistently cuts through whatever melody is being played,” explains Elswyth.

“Now I’m always looking for tunes that feel like they’ll speak productively to a drone. The piece ‘Jack Lattin’ from the new album is an obvious example of that, as it’s drawn from the border pipes repertory. I love the way drones are used in spiritual jazz, but it feels quite different to the way that most folk musicians are using them. In spiritual or cosmic jazz, the drone is transcendent, hopeful, upward-looking, while the drone in contemporary folk is usually earthy, dark, downward-looking. But maybe in the future we can find a way to reconcile the two approaches, so they can speak to each other: as above, so below.”

This article originally appeared in the June 22024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today