Nathan Bowles Joins the Brotherhood of Bachelors.

Photo by Constance Mensh; flag by Anthony Campuzano

We are delighted to welcome our friend Brother Nathan Bowles, of Blacksburg, Virginia (by way of Sleepy Lake, Virginia–seriously) to the PoB fold. Nathan is a righteous journeyman of the highest order, working with the likes of Pelt, the Black Twig Pickers, Jack Rose, Black Dirt Oak, Scott Verrastro, Pigeons, Spiral Joy Band, and others. He’s recently been touring as Steve Gunn‘s drummer, and he plays on Steve’s new record Way Out Weather; he also performs on several Hiss Golden Messenger albums and often joins M.C. Taylor onstage for full band shows.

We were duly impressed with his first solo banjo record A Bottle, A Buckeye (2012, Soft Abuse), and his new one Nansemond demonstrates a sophisticated evolution of his solo practice and compositional abilities. It’s also, in our estimation, one of the best sounding and most sonically immersive albums thus far in the PoB catalog. Stay tuned for more details about the new album, due out in the fall, but until then, please feel free to peruse Nathan’s artist page, also reproduced below, along withe links and some video.

Lift a glass to the Great Dismal Swamp, y’all.

BIO

Nathan Bowles is a multi-instrumentalist musician and teacher living in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. His work, both as an accomplished solo artist and as a sought-after ensemble player, explores the rugged country between the poles of Appalachian old-time traditions and ecstatic, minimalist drone. Although his recent solo recordings prominently feature his virtuosic banjo, Bowles is also widely recognized as a drummer, and he considers himself first and foremost a percussionist, with banjo as a natural extension of his percussive practice.

He and his bandmates in the popular and critically acclaimed old-time group the Black Twig Pickers steep themselves in local traditions of Appalachian folk music and dance, very much a vital part of cultural life in the region. As a member of the long-running improvisational drone outfit Pelt, Bowles focuses on the various sonic possibilities inherent in struck and bowed percussion—metal, wood, skin, or otherwise. When playing by his lonesome under his birthname, he prefers either minimal and hyper-nuanced percussive drone or tranced-out solo clawhammer banjo. Bowles has also recorded, collaborated, and performed with Steve Gunn, Jack Rose, Hiss Golden Messenger, Black Dirt Oak, Scott Verrastro, Pigeons, Spiral Joy Band, and others.

The seven songs on his second solo album Nansemond deploy banjo, percussion, piano, tapes, and—for the first time—his robust voice, moving effortlessly between composed sections, improvised passages, and field recordings. The Nansemond suite demonstrates the elasticity of Appalachian and Piedmont stringband music and the inherent connections, when those forms are distended, dilated, and dissected—as in the “Sleepy Lake” pieces, “Chuckatuck,” or “Golden Floaters/Hog Jank”—to contemporary improvised and post-minimalist avant-garde music. Bowles’ inventive playing on the album somehow finds common ground between tradition-bearing masters like Dock Boggs, Dink Roberts, and Etta Baker and the outré compositional experiments and extended techniques of Paul Metzger, Clive Palmer, and Henry Flynt. But these two strains always feel purposefully and organically integrated, not distinct or hierarchical, and that elegant and novel elision is perhaps the most notable accomplishment of these hypnotic recordings: they respectfully refuse to accept the porous boundaries between Southern vernacular music and modernism.