Chaz Knapp, Cy Werner, Lake Mary

Microfolk

Scissor Tail Editions

MP3 $9.90

09/01/2023 795154143559

SCTR 063

FLAC $11.99

09/01/2023 795154143559

SCTR 063

This may be the perfect summer wind down album. We all get to enjoy the cicadas one last time before Autumn, or play these tapes and pretend summer isn't coming to a close. Chaz Knapp, Cy Werner (Magic Tuber String Band) and Chaz Prymek (Lake Mary) created such a beautiful atmospheric album - recorded live to tape in the Ozark Mountains in streams and caves. All improvised and recorded to tape with acoustic instruments, mostly; violin, banjo, and guitar. There's some occasional vocal harmonic drones and the natural drone of the summer cicadas before their final rest. It's really such a pure and peaceful album, I haven't been able to stop listening to it this summer. - ST

The first of the three is a collaboration between myself and Chaz Prymek (Lake Mary). The project started with ‘Early Morning Grievers’, I stepped out on my porch to record a storm, quickly grabbed some tape recorders and my dulcimer and began to create the beginning of what would become the Microfolk sessions.

The second is a collaboration with Courtney Werner (Magic Tuber Stringband). After I moved to Arkansas a two years ago, I had met Courtney, who was living in Arkansas for six months for field research, through a mutual friend. We recorded two albums worth of material, outdoors, in the brutal summer heat.

Volume three combines all three of us, improvising over recordings of each other. Live improvisations over tape loops Knapp made of Prymek’s playing, recording and looping Werner live. Sending the improvs back to Prymek to record over in Missouri.

“Knapps’s dulcimer and intention shine like sunlight through the woods, holding everything together. With patient and care Knapp leads these sessions somewhere unique, a real love letter to the Ozarks”

Recorded and improvised outside throughout Arkansas & Missouri - Chaz Knapp