An hour into Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, the titular “stalker”—a man paid to guide seekers through a lush yet hazardous biome called the Zone— begins to muse on a topic familiar to anyone who has wrestled with aesthetic philosophy in college seminars or between bong rips. Music, he says, is “merely empty sound without associations”—so how does it “miraculously penetrate your very soul”? Monroe Beardsley, Peter Kivy, or your stoner friend can take that one. The existential enormity of the Stalker’s next question overshadows his first: “Why is this all necessary? And above all, for whom?”
For whom? It’s a question critics and listeners alike should ask more often of new music. Many albums are touching, entertaining, well-crafted. It takes an album like Heavy Water—the luminous and disquieting new release from Durham-based avant-folk trio Magic Tuber Stringband—to remind you that music can be a community service and an offering. Written in tribute to Ellenton, South Carolina, a town destroyed in the 1950s for the construction of a nuclear materials plant, the 11 compositions on Heavy Water weave ecologically evocative string explorations with audio from the now abandoned facility site, a Zone-like expanse of “beautiful, wasted landscapes” where fiddle player Courtney Werner worked as a graduate researcher testing songbirds for radioactivity. Less subtle hands might have spun the fibers of this grief—an uprooted community, a poisoned ecosystem—into an overwrought elegy. Heavy Water sits instead at the sickbed of Ellenton, and of humanity: reverent, uneasy and dutiful, it’s a record reflective of Tarkovsky’s belief that true art is a form of prayer.
Barred from incorporating Christian themes into his work by Soviet censors, Tarkovsky turned to science fiction as a cover for religious expression; looking at the recent boom in “experimental traditionalism,” you have to wonder if artists adding synthesizers to old-time songs are pulling a similar move to sneak tradition into new music scenes via electronic innovation. One of the refreshing elements of Magic Tuber Stringband’s craft—a hybrid, scholarly brew of fractured folk and mystic drone inspired by folklorists like Atahualpa Yupanqui and by fellow North Carolinian Henry Flynt’s hypnotic “hillbilly minimalism”—is that they execute such experimental impulses with largely analog methods. Heavy Water’s bells and whistles are organic: field recordings, tape-loop manipulations by Oliver Child-Lanning (who organizes Weirs, a collective to which Werner and bandmates Evan Morgan and Michael DeVito also belong), and the evergreen trick of bending one’s instrument beyond expectation.
With string lines that swoop like swallows and peel like strips of birch bark, Magic Tuber Stringband display a deep attention to the sonics of fauna and flora (Werner is a self-professed fan of Evan Parker With Birds, though Andrew Bird instrumentals or the trills of “The Lark Ascending” might also be a point of comparison for those with less avant-garde avian ball knowledge). But Heavy Water doesn’t simply mimic nature—it renders the preternatural, too, with a naturalist’s vision. On “The Death of Ellenton,” the Tubers drone over a 1951 country gospel song chronicling the demise of the town, stretching the tape until it becomes as translucent as gossamer. On “Scintillation,” the trio’s elastic plucking, composed to imitate flickering lights of photodetectors, could just as easily be raindrops. The built world encroaches—in the artillery fire on “Woodpackers,” in the roaring railroad of “Sound of a Million Stars”—with a presence that’s foreboding, but never cartoonish. (This isn’t The Lorax.) Like the work of artist Tomonari Nishikawa, whose experimental film of negatives buried beneath the soil of Fukushima lends its name to the swarming, angry “Sound of a Million Stars,” Magic Tuber Stringband let the violence of industry illuminate and implicate itself through exposure and abstraction.
Most of the noisier and more heavily manipulated tracks appear on the album’s less accessible A-side. For heady listeners, this will be a field day; for others, a test of faith. Stay the course. The luminescent B-side, a release valve for the intensity of Heavy Water’s first half, contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard in recent memory. The Tubers are gifted at “music as a gradual process,” and on the two longest tracks—“Tribute to the Angels” and “Wintering Grounds”—they drift in and out of structure like roaming fireflies, gathering close for snatches of old-time tunes and collapsing back into keening, overlapping phrases. The gentleness of the record’s second act starkly contrasts its beginnings, nowhere more self-consciously than on penultimate track “Soft and Pliable,” a composition of quietude and emergence titled for a quote from Stalker (itself a citation of the Tao Te Ching): “Softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard… Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.” Scratching high on the bridge, Werner’s splintering fiddle calls to mind the slow, magical hatching of an egg. It’s then you might picture something unbearably soft: a downy baby bird, struggling into a world that will only poison it.
For whom? There’s your answer. On Heavy Water, Magic Tuber Stringband play the part of stalkers, shepherding us through a world dazzling and dangerous, reminding us what’s sacrificed when we abandon softness, and paying tribute to what’s already abandoned. The final sound on Heavy Water isn’t soft—it’s a scraping, hollow resonance that lingers after the strings die out. Like radiation, Heavy Water leaves you with a taste of metal in your mouth.
