It's been a couple years since Magic Tuber Stringband's last LP, Needlefall. Today, the North Carolina duo-turned-trio known for traditional Appalachian folk music is announcing their new album Heavy Water. The lead single "Tribute To The Angels" is out now.
On Heavy Water, fiddler Courtney Werner and 12-string guitarist Evan Morgan are joined by bassist/banjoist Mike DeVito. It also has Oliver Child-Lanning on tape loops and Jasper Lee doing field recordings. Werner's work as an ecologist on the Savannah River Site in rural South Carolina served as the inspiration for the record, about which Werner says:
The town of Ellenton, South Carolina was the largest of the towns displaced in 1952 by the U.S. federal government to build the Savannah River Plant, which produced radioactive materials for U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The former site of Ellenton was dedicated to the extraction of heavy water while other areas of the plant focused on manufacturing weapons-grade plutonium and tritium within nuclear reactors. Heavy water is chemically altered to be denser than normal water and is incredibly expensive and time-consuming to produce, requiring 52 gallons of river water for one fluid ounce. The process was fueled by a coal combustion powerhouse, and now the river floodplain adjacent to the remnants of Ellenton is covered by a plume of toxic coal ash.
Appalachia and the rural South are often caught up with a cliché, whimsical desire to "return" to "better" times – simpler, more wholesome, relaxing, quaint. We are interested in the degradation and exploitation that permeates these landscapes and is smoothed over or repackaged in a palatable way in the preservation of their folk traditions. We felt the loss of the people whose livelihoods had been connected to the land and who were forcibly removed. Now the land is contaminated to the extent that the possibility of a lasting, personal relationship with it — through growing food, collecting clean water, building a home — is severed.
Hear "Tribute To The Angels" below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "The Death Of Ellenton"
02 "Marker Of A Drowning"
03 "Sound Of A Million Stars"
04 "Woodpeckers"
05 "Scintillation"
06 "Blooms In The Rapids"
07 "Tribute To The Angels"
08 "Where The Place Becomes Forgetting"
09 "Wintering Grounds"
10 "Soft And Pliable"
11 "Dog-Headed Man"
Heavy Water is out 5/22 on Thrill Jockey. Pre-order it here.
