Most of the music I write about ranges from well known to iconic. I am not one of these people who takes pleasure in knowing about obscurities that other people don’t. However, I do have one intense fandom for a couple of guys who you are likely not to have heard of, Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine. I took the family to see them recently in a converted church in Kingston, NY, and the music sounded like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My son the Ursula Le Guin fan thinks they sound like a pair of bards from one of the more remote islands in Earthsea. I leave their shows with my senses fully activated in a way that rarely happens at my age.
When I was talking to Peter after the Kingston show, he mentioned that he and Tim have been playing music together for forty years. You can tell!
I first heard Tim and Peter in 1995 as members of Cordelia’s Dad, a band that is difficult to describe. Sometimes they played bare, minimal acoustic folk that prefigured Tim and Peter’s current sound:
But they also played hard, angular rock that people moshed to:
By the way, the other voice you’re hearing on those tunes is the wonderful Cath Tyler.
Sometimes the band did split shows, with an acoustic set and a rock set. The audience for such an experience was not large, but it was intense. Those shows were massively horizon-broadening for me. You can get a good sense of what we were experiencing from this raw and unpolished collection of live performances, which sound as fresh to me now as it did when I was 20.
Much as I loved being pummeled by the rock stuff, as a middle aged dad, the acoustic stuff speaks to me more.
For several years, the band included the superb fiddler Laura Risk. She and Peter did a thing where he drummed delicately on the strings with chopsticks in between her fingers and the bow while she played. It might sound like a goofy novelty until you hear how it sounds. Listen starting at 1:03.
Tim is one of my favorite singers in the world. He was already arresting when he was younger, but over time, he has expanded and deepened his sound.
A lot of his recent material involves overtone singing; listen to the end of this tune at 3:08 for an example.
Tim was always an inventive and cliche-resistant rock guitarist and an excellent clawhammer banjo player. In his solo work, you can also hear him playing fiddle, flute, bowed banjo, and fretless bajo sexto.
Tim likes returning to the same tune over and over with new arrangements and approaches. Here’s a favorite from the early 90s:
And here’s how Tim recorded it in 2012:
Not all of Tim’s material is violent, terrifying or heartbroken. Sometimes it’s gently wistful. I sang this tune to my kids as a lullaby when they were little:
Here’s the least corny Christmas album ever:
Tim does a lot of unaccompanied singing, and he made an entire album that way:
He sometimes steps out of traditional idioms to write spookily beautiful originals like this one, which is a favorite tune of my wife’s:
It’s easy for me to articulate what all this music meant to me as a young person. I was always interested in folk, Americana, old-time music, and so on, but growing up I mostly heard that it interpreted by hippies and oriented around (a white version of) the blues. It was startling to hear these kinds of songs played and sung with a punk aesthetic instead, and to hear Eastern European elements mixed in. When I was at my lowest points, feeling miserable, directionless and isolated, their bleak austerity was the only thing that made sense to me.
But now, as a not particularly miserable middle aged dad with plenty of direction and some good relationships, why does this music still work so well for me? And more surprisingly, why do my kids like it? Some of it is that now there’s a little more light mixed in with the darkness of Tim’s sound, and Peter’s sonically playful side shows through more too. Peter told me that he’s going to start playing MIDI vibraphone, and Tim used some Brian Eno octave shimmer on one song in the Kingston show. The stories of horrible industrial accidents and fiddles made of skeletons are still there, but the emotional palette is wider, is what I’m saying.
The main reason I want people listening to these guys is that they are just so good at their thing. Their attention to detail, their freedom from received wisdom about what “folk” music is supposed to sound like, and their decades-long commitment to their idiosyncratic vision is endlessly inspirational to me. They reliably blow the cobwebs off of me, which is ironic given how cobwebby their music is. They are touring more this fall and probably won’t be doing it forever, so if you get a chance to go, you should go. The best way to find out when and where is by joining Tim’s mailing list, which you can do on his web site. Tell him I said hi.