Daniel Bachman is known as a prolific guitarist, composer, and producer, and he’s just added author to that list. Sycamore City & Other True Stories is a new short story collection from Bachman, released by surprise today with a companion soundtrack. The musical component is one single 45-minute song called “Cemetery Music,” a folk-tinged drone track built around a field recording captured between two cemeteries along Crater Road in Petersburg Virginia. It feels like the perfect ambient context for Bachman’s prose, which is being promoted like so:

Cash, Kill, Blood, Money, Shit, Job, Psychic, Death, Dog, Dream, Ghost, Chicken, Devil, Dinner, Love. We all know the history of the United States is an undeniably brutal one. From the violent colonial campaigns into Indian Country, to our current municipal police budgets, life is cheap, and business is booming. Get back to work. Get in line. Get used to it. These themes run through the following collection of short stories. Some inspiration has been taken verbatim from family history and lived experience. Some material has been taken out of the historical archive. And while some narrative details have been fictionalized or combined, these stories are all true. The accompanying audio track, “Cemetery Music,” is intended to be played while reading and is centered around an environmental recording made along Crater Road in Petersburg Virginia, with the segregated Blandford Cemetery on the left side of the street, and People’s Memorial Cemetery on the right. I hope this collection of stories helps to illustrate the cycles of violence, power, and occasional absurdity of the American experience. How we live the same as it ever was, from the Virginia Company to the Amazon distribution center. To further emphasize the disposability of the American worker. And to highlight our shared human experience through the tired centuries. This collection of stories is dedicated to the spirits all around us, with the hope that reckoning with their painful past will help set us free.

You can buy a PDF of Sycamore City & Other True Stories along with the “Cemetery Music” audio at Bandcamp. And if you want to preview the music, here ya go: