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Tulsa, Oklahoma is probably one place you would not expect to find a bouzouki or a person who can play one. But thankfully for the spirit of international culture, husband and wife team Brad and Eden Rose live in that very city. They make music under many names (most notably the North Sea but also Wax Ghost, Golden Oaks, and Agilvsga), and with many friends (from Michael Donnelly of Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood to Robert Horton (as Eastern Fox Squirrels)), but Corsican Paintbrush is purely their creation, their musical offspring. Combining lush instrumentation with clattering percussion and ramshackle beats, Corsican Paintbrush creates a new world of sound out of old world technology.
Fresh from a sold-out lathe-cut record split with Italy's prolific space-artists My Cat is An Alien, and following up two beautiful CD-r releases on Foxglove and Musicyourmindwillloveyou, Corsican Paintbrush has focused their considerable talents and energies into a "proper" CD release.
Swerving feverishly between what could easily be chopped up Native American rhythms, sampled Celtic melodies, and space-age funk played on trash heaps, the music of Corsican Paintbrush is actually all of this and none of it. "Aquarian Hymns" is nine tracks of gorgeously recorded acoustic grace; marked with periodic bursts of lysergic freak-outs, from the sharpened slide guitar strings and tired voice of "Break Through These Branches" to the heavy accordion and woodwind drones of the closing track "Aquarius". The true masterpiece of the release is the expansive and slow-developing "Carbon Revival", taking its sweet time (over fifteen minutes) to uncoil its scaly form and sink its dripping fangs into your mind.
Corsican Paintbrush paints an engrossing picture of a folk music never before encountered, and it does so with broad and yet delicate swaths of color and texture. Just don't call this sound New Age or Ethnic Folk, it digs deeper and broader than that, sounding at times like a piece from the richly diverse Sublime Frequencies collection, and at other times like a death march across the desert, carried on the back of the Sunburned Hand of the Man.
tracklist:
1. no traditional exaltation
2. goldenrod fields
3. break through these branches (audio sample)
4. xanthus
5. the water bearer's detriment to the sun
6. carbon revival
7. mutable earth
8. hallelujah! mother mary
9. aquarius
Praise for Corsican Paintbrush:
What we get here is subtly clattering folk ceremonies that sound like if they would have been recorded under water or at the very edge between a vast, red barked pine forest and a juniper-clad meadow with the first sunlight of the day reaching just over the treetops. If there ever is a sound that could be called timeless it got to be this and after playing this disk a cpl of times in a row all I can think of is to get out of the house and explore all the aspects I love about the fall. Lovely. - Mats Gustafsson, The Broken Face