The Invisible Comes to Us

Memory is an elusive and unreliable thing. The second album from the American folk duo passes like a memory recalled through a dream. Field recordings from 1930s and 40s Virginia and the north-east states are reimagined in an avant-garde soundscape conjured up with the help of producer Benjamin Lazar Davis of Brooklyn hipsters Cuddle Magic.

Elizabeth LaPrelle, hailing from Rural Retreat, Virginia, is regarded as one of the finest Appalachian singers of her generation. Her partnership with Vermont-born singer Anna Roberts-Gevalt takes an American song tradition they both feel in their bones and interprets it in audacious ways. This is their first recording on Smithsonian Folkways and, as well as delving into the small archives of towns in Virginia and Vermont, they have also made use of the American Folklife Center in Washington, DC. The eerie, drone-filled build-up of pump organ, half-captured noises and looping phrases, makes for an unsettling listen. Amid it, their voices rise like clear bells. After the spare simplicity of their eponymous debut, this is a much more conceptual affair. Though it lacks the purity of their first album, the atmosphere of this record, ending with an original field recording of the opener, is undeniably unique.