Rising Appalachia - The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know (2021)

Led by multi-instrumentalist sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know is Rising Appalachia‘s latest album release. They are accompanied by Duncan Wickel on fiddle and cello, David Brown on guitar and double bass with Biko Casini’s djembe and calabash kit and Arouna Diara on ngoni and balafon adding a global texture.

Released as a ‘surprise’ for fans with no advance word, it’s a lengthy and progressive folk textured work with only one of the nine tracks being under five minutes with a total playing time of 55 minutes. Despite their name, there’s an air of traditional English folk to be heard on the opening Catalyst lurching along and built around double bass throb and percussive clicks and snaps.

Ngoni, named for and featuring the traditional Mali stringed instrument, coloured here with bass pulses and string, is a dry, atmospheric instrumental, followed by the seven-minute narcotic ambience of Silver with its percussive pulses, fingerpicked classical guitar and wordless vocals.

Muted jazzy percussion and double bass opens the heady eastern-hued soundscapes of Tempest, another mood piece instrumental conjuring mental images of sprawling desert nights, followed by the equally lengthy instrumental watery and shimmering stringed cascades of Lost Girl and its circling Appalachian fiddle.

Things get experimental with Top Shelf with its fractured percussing clicks, bass, distorted fiddle and woozy use of bluesy vocals emerging as if out of an opium fog with its repeated title phrase and the line “lay me out like a picnic”. Opening with cello drone and acoustic guitar picking, Clay returns to minimalist instrumental territory before the arrival of hushed, whisperingly spacey vocals midway before submerging back into the dreamlike miasma.

Skittering along on double bass, itchy percussion and tinkling bells Keep Going with its African rhythms is the shortest track and also the only one where the vocals play a prominent role, even if the lyrics are largely limited to “just keep going”.

It ends with a full on nine-minute Depth, the African percussive stringed instruments conjuring an exotic trace-like mood before the bass pulse and clicks expand the hypnotic groove and a spoken sibilant-heavy shamanesque passage briefly emerges from the smoke like a feline peyote-high beat-poet Jim Morrison as the instruments sway around the voices as they soar echoey into the ether and the track finally putters and dissolves into air.

They’ve always mixed the experimental with their more traditional folk material, but here they dive right into the depths for an album that fully stretches their improvisational, jam abilities and is undoubtedly one of the most intoxicating musical experiences you’ll have this year.