The Virginia guitarist shares an album length film for his latest release Almanac Behind, which assembles folk improvisations, radio transmissions and field recordings of climate breakdown
“In January, we had a freak snowstorm that produced really intense, heavy precipitation – caused tree damage, wrecked powerlines,” says American Primitive guitarist and composer Daniel Bachman, speaking to Louis Pattison in The Wire 467. “We lost power for an extended period because we didn’t have a generator at the time. And we’re on a well, so we didn’t have water,” he laughs. “It was pretty wild.”
This experience led to Bachman laying the foundations to his latest album, Almanac Behind, which combines field recordings of local meteorological events with his own instrumentation. “For six months from January, I’d record all the extreme, anomalous weather events happening,” he continues. “I didn’t expect to get a lot of the sounds that are on the record. But things just fell into place.”
To accompany the album's audio, Bachman also edited together a full length film, featuring weather reports, footage from his home in rural Virginia, and live performance on guitar and banjo.
Read Louis Pattison's interview with Bachman in full in The Wire 467. Subscribers can also read the article via the online library.
