AEM099 Blaque Boose

Evil—living like it, sound­ing like it, being it—was some­thing akin to the Holy Grail of Old Weird Amer­ica. Even today, lis­ten­ing to Harry Smith or Good­bye Baby­lon or the Secret Museum of Mankind, the sen­sa­tion is more phys­i­cal than intel­lec­tual, a moon­shine chill cours­ing through your lym­phatic sys­tem, the min­gled smell of blood and wet leaves ris­ing out of the earth in tiny, invis­i­ble par­ti­cles. You don’t get into this kind of music; it gets into you. Like whiskey, it’s the infec­tive, curse-like qual­ity of the really good, ancient stuff that dis­tin­guishes it from any num­ber of fresher, younger, end­lessly sub­cat­e­go­rized “Folk” brands, kids who think flan­nel and whis­per­ing con­sti­tute a work­able detour around the cross­roads, or that “Freak”—indeed, unspeak­able freakiness—wasn’t a fun­da­men­tal part of the 12-bar equa­tion to begin with. I’m not down with call­ing any kind of music-making dis­re­spect­ful, but the late-20th century’s turn towards the easy-listening side of acoustic trad stylings cer­tainly is bor­ing, like if sud­denly we started col­lec­tively imag­in­ing that all jazz sounded like Mel Torme, or that punk rock began and ended with Good Char­lotte. Folk is not chill music, it is chill­ing music. And, more so than vir­tu­ally every other con­tem­po­rary folk artist, from the catelepsy-inducing bore­dom of Iron & Wine, to the fey shenani­gans of the Decem­berists, to the woolier ten­den­cies of Deven­dra and Wooden Wand, Blaque Boose under­stand the implicit and elec­tri­fy­ing hor­ror of the orig­i­nal craft.

Based out of the Maine hin­ter­lands, Blaque Boose fore­grounds the dis­arm­ingly eery vocal tal­ents of a woman named Sheena Char­land and encases them in a dust storm of fin­ger­picked gui­tars, cav­ernous flutes and some fairly aggres­sive tape-mangling. The effect is more darkly hal­lu­cino­genic than psy­che­delic, like the mid­dle hours of an end­less acid trip ini­ti­ated in a trailer park and mov­ing ever closer to the busted speaker a sec­ond­hand, static-spitting wire­less radio. There are no good vibes here, just the aural his­tory of a life­time of bad lovers and men­tal health prob­lems. It’s great, like Throb­bing Gris­tle dis­man­tling the myth of Amer­ica from a fall­out bunker filled with strange, rural preserves.

What’s inter­est­ing about Blaque Boose’s approach to the folksy idiom is how true to tra­di­tion it seems with­out sound­ing any­thing like what purists might clas­sify as “authen­tic.” Sure, some of the sta­ples are here: repet­i­tive, blues-informed song struc­tures; acoustic instru­ments all over the place; thick ban­shee har­monies. But when you fac­tor in the infi­nite over­dubs, the cav­ernous ambi­ence, the elec­tronic mal­func­tions cours­ing through the back­ground, it becomes over­whelm­ingly clear that we’re a long way from the song­book. All the styl­is­tic famil­iar­i­ties here are based on vibe, not sonic mim­icry. There’s no fake vinyl hiss. No lyrics about dev­ils and train tracks. No man­dolins. Yet some­how, the whole thing cap­tures an unnam­able, old-school real­ness beyond the aes­thetic. It’s a demonic authen­tic­ity, like the mus­cle tremors and delu­sions of the pos­sessed. You only know it’s there when you feel it for yourself.

So let’s feel it. Check out A-side “Win­ter,” an undu­lat­ing dirge of acoustic frag­ments and witchy chant­ing. Charland’s voice has a deep, mys­ti­cal qual­ity almost organ­i­cally suited to the delayed multi-tracking of the lyrics. You don’t imag­ine the record­ing tech­nol­ogy, but a kind of multi-headed medusa with impec­ca­ble pitch and an intro­spec­tive bent. It’s like being caught in a hur­ri­cane in the mid­dle of a haunted pine for­est, half-nature and half-magic. The track engulfs you in a thicket of tor­tured har­monies, a sound col­lage ren­dered out of wind and break­ing branches and shred­ded bark. It doesn’t get rawer.

B-side “Past Lives Owen,” a med­i­ta­tion on Charland’s for­mer boyfriend and band­mate, might be what Nico would have recorded had she been raised in a one-room shack in Appalachia with noth­ing in it but a Wurl­itzer and some tape-splicing equip­ment. Less a song than a kind of super­nat­ural field record­ing, “Past Lives” makes good on the dark promises of “Win­ter,” creep­ing ever fur­ther off the well-beaten path of chord pro­gres­sions and verses towards some­thing more abstract, more entropic, the kind of noise you could imag­ine emerg­ing from the bored spir­its of aban­doned farm­steads, the unearthing of some­thing eter­nal and malev­o­lent. The evil, of course, has always been here, lurk­ing in the shad­ows, poi­son­ing the drink­ing water. Blaque Boose, like any archivists worth their micro­phones, are in the busi­ness of preservation.

The Blaque Boose 7-inch is part of Eter­nal Otter Records’ Death Rebirth & Trans­for­ma­tion vinyl series, and is avail­able through Ampeater’s Store.

Ben Las­man

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