In the immediate aftermath of Daniel Bachman's widely celebrated self-titled offering in 2016, he found himself at a crossroads. Burned out from traveling the endless road and disoriented by a dark reality ushered in by Donald Trump's presidential election, he retreated to his native Virginia after a long sojourn living in North Carolina. He spent the next year-and-a-half in solitude working on various sound and folklore projects.
His 2016 date showcased his long-held fascination with drones, found sound, and field recordings, juxtaposing them against his playing technique and compositional M.O. He began indulging those notions more in the aftermath, moving further afield to allow more chance and environmental elements to inform his music. Using a multi-track cassette recorder and his iPhone, Bachman placed himself at the mercy of his emergent Muse. He began revealing the spaces and tones from various sources and combining them in new ways, often determined purely by accident.
The end result is The Morning Star, a seven-track, 75-minute journey into the unknown. Easily his most provocative album, the lion's share of its music foregoes standard musical structures in favor of expressionist musical soundscapes that offer an externalization of a highly intuitive, almost instinctive approach to sound creation. While Bachman does play guitars (six- and 12-strings, lap steel) he also plays a chord organ, curates AM radio transmissions, and introduces field recordings (captured by himself and his sister Sarah), shruti box, and raw fiddle drones (courtesy of Ian McColm and Forrest Marquisee, respectively) to emerge with a double-album-length journey through hidden atmospheres and dimensions. The 18-minute opener "Invocation" commences with the echoing bells before shruti, guitar, and fiddle drones, and AM radio transmissions crack the ether and dislocate the listener. It gives way to the 12-plus minute "Sycamore City," whose hissing and sonics, alongside the noises of beetles and cicadas, create a backdrop for his wandering fingerpicking offering Eastern drone modes in circular fashion. On "Car," a whirlwind tunnel of ambient noise frames a heavily reverbed radio preacher's voice possessed by logorrhea. The organic soundscapes Bachman introduces in those three cuts create the feeling of otherness. So much so that when a solo guitar delivers a mutant folk blues in "Song for the Setting Sun III" (with a siren wafting in the background) and the octave drones and fingerpicked rounds in "Song for the Setting Sun IV" we're jolted awake to abandon our trance state to follow the music down the rabbit hole. These set up "Scrumpy," a distorted 12-string American Primitive exercise in tonal investigation -- appended by the sound of Bachman's breathing -- as a dramatic climax. But closer "New Moon" goes further; its 13 minutes meld his Weissenborn guitar slide blues, droning harmonium, insect sounds, and natural room ambience that traverse the artist's previously held creative boundaries. The Morning Star is at once brave and solitary, gentle and bracing, provocative and spiritually resonant. It extends Bachman's reach, allowing him to paint the innermost dimensions of the world he perceives and cleave it open for light to flood in and illuminate it for us.