It's the same old story: two friends miss a flight to Finland, and instead of booking another they hole up for a week, take ample nature walks, and create an album of stark, dark folk. OK, the premise isn't often played out, but with results like this, you would hope that it was.
Tau Emerald's Travellers Two -- a wyrd folk collaboration between Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Sharron Kraus -- contains songs, per se, but it provokes such a strong feel that conventional descriptions are futile. I wish I could just let the album do the talking, but short of visiting every reader with a copy and taking away 45 minutes of their lives to force it on them, I’ll do my best.
A collection of minimal ruminations and drones, the music is persuasive because of what it lacks. It is a no-frills, hand-made curio by two pioneers living off the land. It is not polished and not precisely played, but it has a welcoming haunt to it. "Stoikite" is a pleasant seashells-and-bells diversion. "Bani Caapi" is a short drone featuring voice, intermittent string plucks, and a wall of sound reminiscent of duck and bird calls. The tracks featuring the ladies' voices are the most enjoyable; some are accompanied by spare instrumentation, relying on Burke's and Kraus' dry but dulcet voices to deliver cauldron-gathering hokum with medieval chanting ("Travellers Two," Henbane"), to float lightly in the background as a buffering tool, or to command the front and center as the featured instrument ("Full Moon," the campfire drumming stop-gap "Pilgrim's Return," "Mermaids Call").
The album is rural and organic, as though Burke and Kraus grabbed whatever was close at hand in order to supplement them, but only when necessary. Whistles joust with single drums and single strums, guitar is rare but present and accounted for, accordion swells with great effect, and string things of many shapes and colors are used extemporaneously to create a backwoodsy creeper vibe. It's remote cottage psychedelic folk music that lacks form, but that is precisely what pulls us in and doesn’t let us go. Tau Emerald won't satisfy die-hard music trendies, but it's a spry little experimental work.
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