Next month, the Virginia guitar virtuoso Daniel Bachman will follow his 2018 double album The Morning Star with a new LP called Axacan. Bachman makes folk-inspired fingerpicked instrumental reveries, and on Axacan, he’s combining those acoustic pieces with field recordings that he’s been making. Bachman has already shared “Coronach,” a meditative and hypnotic nine-minute track from the album. Today, he’s dropped another one.

The new track “Blues In The Anthropocene” is both shorter and stranger than “Coronach.” On this one, Bachman’s guitar sounds distant and muted, and it shares muffled, impersonal clanks and hums. It sounds like the sounds of a decaying country working to drown out ghosts of music.

Here’s what Bachman says about the song:

The anthropocene refers to ‘the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.’ The track begins at a Potomac River creek bed, where Pocahontas was traded for a copper kettle, and ends with rain at George Washington’s childhood plantation “Ferry Farm.” Mournful guitar ruminations conclude with feedback from the Virginia governor’s first public address concerning Covid-19.

Listen to the track below.

Axacan is out 5/7 on Three Lobed Recordings.