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Blake Hornsby is an acoustic guitar player based out of North Carolina. His experimental, often freeform playing brings in many styles and cultures, blending blues and fast fingerstyle playing with eastern music, Indian raga and ragtime. This busy, creative mindset is immediately present on his new album, which features five tracks, with Bury My Soul in the Linville River hitting over twenty-three minutes.
Whispering Waters begins with a quickly paced ragtime style riff that gathers momentum for a minute or so before a heavily plucked bass string shifts the piece into a more free improvised vein, with plenty of space and some dramatic string buzzes before a frenetic, strummed pattern kicks in. As the piece develops, so does the anxiety in the music, with flicks, picks and plucks tumbling around each other before the jaunty little ragtime tune sees the song out. As a message, it tells us there is ability aplenty, with the canvas to match it.
Laurel Creek Blues, a piece Blake considers ‘happy blues’, is certainly lighter in tone than the opener, with a tune reminiscent of Jack Rose’s Kensington Blues beginning the song before a hypnotic refrain takes up the midsection. The deliberate use of the higher strings certainly gives the song an easy character, and it balances nicely with Whispering Waters.
Later on, O How the Water Flows North is a real strange fruit that starts with a quite relaxing, gently picked and spacious guitar part. As the tune develops, a hint of unsettledness bleeds into the music through string bends, repeated hammer-ons and eerie harmonics, all placed in pockets of silence. In a way, it’s like watching a film built of lingering long landscape shots and an underlying sense of danger at the peripherals, and when the weird, scraping scuzz and warped voices of the last couple of minutes begin, you may have both eyebrows raised. I loved it.
But the real pièce de résistance must be the final song, Bury My Soul in the Linville River, an evening raga apparently based on an Indian piece called Yaman that spans a whole side of the cassette release. Here, Blake brings in accompaniments in the shape of tabla, electric violin and shruti box, with him playing guitar and tamboura. The violin, provided by Sam Fanthorpe, is overlaid and joins Gaia Lawing’s shruti to create a lovely soothing drone in the background. Nearly halfway in, Jonathon Sale’s tabla kicks in to change the shape of the raga, giving it a more persistent rhythm that the violin steps up to join and the guitar gamely stays with. Blake’s guitar heads into more bananas territory in the last third, enjoying a more free and improvised-sounding approach before some tweaked vocals up the weird levels near the end.
If it all sounds like a bit of a challenge, then fear not; for all of the free expression that is present across the album, there is a real sense of musicianship and creativity on show, too, and it makes for a quite exhilarating listen. Pull up a chair and allow it to wash over you.
A Village of Many Springs (10th October 2024)
Bandcamp (Digital and Cassette via Monadnock Sound & Vision)
Available on LP by the end of the year.
Note from Blake Hornsby on the album’s title:
Watauga (wuh-TAW-guh) is a Cherokee word that is said to translate to ‘Whispering Waters’ or ‘A Village of Many Springs’. It is also the name of a county in Western North Carolina where I lived from 2014-2022.
All of the tunes on this album not only reference Watauga and the surrounding areas but also water. Appalachia is a place with an abundance of water.
Watauga and the surrounding counties have a very special place in my heart. This album is an ode to Watauga: A Village of Many Springs.
More of Blake’s music can be found here: https://blakehornsby.bandcamp.com/
He also appears in one of our KLOF Mixtapes from 2022:
