Elkhorn – Arriving At The Red Valley

Some albums are a place you arrive rather than a destination, and so it was with The Red Valley. Drew and I didn’t so much as set out to make this record, as allowed it to reveal itself to us. On one hand this music is unlike anything on the previous twelve LPs and cassettes we’ve released since The Black River in 2016. On the other, it is a perfect reflection of all the lessons we’ve learned and tools we’ve picked up along the way.

The original tracks at the foundation of this music were completed in a marathon session at Drew’s Harlem studio on the day before Halloween 2021. We had been invited by the Psychedelic Sangha spiritual collective to record an improvisation for a series of Bandcamp meditations they were putting out during the lockdown. I grabbed my Gibson B25 12 string, tuned it down to open C, and drove up to Drew’s place. We came with nothing prepared, only our commitment to making the most relaxed, patient music possible. Drew hit record and over the course of a few hours moved from a small guitar he played like a hammered zither (which became the Sangha’s “On The Flowering Of the Unbounded”), to the vibraphone (jams that Drew added a pass of drums to and were later released on Centripetal Force Records as On The Whole Universe In All Directions), and finally to the frame drum. Drew and I had both been thinking about the frame drum and how it worked with the guitar but hadn’t had an opportunity to try it out together. The alchemical interaction of the guitarist’s thumb and the pulse of a drum has been a consistent theme over the span of Elkhorn‘s discography. I think that with the frame drum, we were looking for a balance between the loose rhythmic approach of using no drummer and the amount of space taken up by someone playing the full kit.

After these first two releases were done and out the door, I thought we were finished with the session, but Drew kept sifting through the frame drum tracks. The zither was still on his mind, and he layered it over some of these tunes to see how it interacted with beautiful results. At this point he played me some of what he’d been working on, and I could hear how the zither had filled in some of the open spaces in the music much as the drums had on the Whole Universe release; but I could also see beyond what he sent me into something even more textured and complex. Maybe it was that Drew’s studio chops gave me the confidence to ask him to tear open the pieces and rebuild them, or maybe it was that I’d recently watched the Beatles Get Back documentary and the idea of using the studio to construct songs was on my mind. Needless to say, Drew was excited about the possibilities as well and jumped into the project whole-heartedly. His only caveat was that wherever the journey took us, we would make sure the tracks saw the light of day at some point and wouldn’t just end up in a drawer. We’ve spent most of our career priding ourselves on being a band that plays live to tape in the studio. In all of our recorded output there had been nary an overdub and very few edits, with the exceptions of Drew’s light, intuitive drumming for On The Whole Universe, and as astute Elkheads will recall, multi-tracking the Miles/Crosby cover of “Guinevere” for Aquarium Drunkard’s Lagniappe series last year. So this was a new road for us to travel.

Together we started exploring different ways of adding and subtracting elements to differentiate the songs and give them focus, improvising over layer after layer. Drew took on most of this by himself at his studio, sending me ideas and then seeing how I reacted to them. We’ve never worked this way, and the concept of being in the music over different times and spaces began to be part of what the music was about. Ideas that had been sitting in the back of our minds came to the fore and the tunes took shape. We used instrumentation and elements like density and space to differentiate the pieces. Instead of assembling a guitar album (or a zither album for that matter) we picked up our brushes and paint and started adding a color here and a stroke there. This was the first time I laid bass down for an Elkhorn album oddly enough, given the fact that I’ve been playing the instrument with Drew since we started jamming together when I was sixteen. I also pulled out the Weissenborn slide guitar I’d been messing around with for a while but had only recorded once before. In addition to the frame drum, zither, and percussion, Drew dropped some killer East African guitar on “Road to Chaco Canyon” and a pass of fuzz vibraphone on “Gray Salt Trail” that truly kicked things into the beyond. But it was “Black Wind of Kayenta” where we realized how this process of mixing the old and the new (with a little knowing wink to ourselves) could result in exciting steps forward. I recorded myself working through some ideas that presented themselves when I stumbled across and purchased a Guild Starfire electric 12 string in Pittsburgh on tour last year, and Drew overdubbed a gorgeous acoustic guitar solo. We made a conscious effort to ride the thin line between not doing enough to the tracks and doing too much. The record continued to take shape.

Another ace up the proverbial Elkhorn sleeve has always been our desire to bring in amazing guest players and highlight their contributions. Jesse Sparhawk is a Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist who I’ve worked with in a variety of contexts from various incarnations of Scott Verrastro’s shape-shifting musical project, Kohoutek, to some next level duos he and I played together on the Philly coffeehouse scene. He is undoubtedly one of the most talented musicians I know, someone who has the ability to map their musical conception directly over mine, and the idea of blending Drew’s zither and Jesse’s harp in some form of psychic ode to Alice Coltrane was intoxicating to me. I reached out and he was more than happy to contribute. Jesse also played pedal-steel over my Weissenborn on “Jackrabbit Hops,” which creates a song-like texture that I don’t think anyone’s ever really heard from this band before. It’s the perfect end to our journey. Or perhaps the beginning of another?

Getting on the same page about what to title our tracks is one of the hardest things for Drew and I, but I suppose it’s a challenge every band that plays instrumental music must face. Sometimes you can just look around, see the B&O Railroad Viaduct and the Riggs Road B&O Trestle, and you’re all set. But that wasn’t going to work here. Rolling the tunes over in my mind and sorting through the sequencing, it all began to take on an almost story-like tone. As I listened, I poured over François Boucq’s art for Jodorowsky’s Bouncer and Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s late 19th century photography. Sitting down with Drew one late summer night on my back porch, we came to the realization that we could frame the album around our experiences of the American Southwest. Although we had traveled there separately with our respective families and friends at different times over the years, these trips could all be layered together into one landscape of our collective memory along with the memories of all those who had inhabited this area over the centuries. I went through my old vacation photographs and found a striking image of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park that seemed to speak directly to the ideas we were thinking about… layers of sand and rock laid down and swept away over and over across the millennia.

All the pieces had just about come together at this point and we could tell we had an incredibly cohesive suite of music in our hands, but it wasn’t really an album until we were introduced to Bill Kellum by Mike Gangloff. Mike (head honcho of heavy hitting bands such as Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, and Eight Point Star) had toured and recorded with us and had found a home for our live Shackamaxon Concert album with Bill’s VHF Records. Bill approached us about doing some more work together just as Drew was putting finishing touches of The Red Valley mix in place and it felt like a perfect fit. The final element was to find a designer for the package and that was handed to us by my friend Jordan Burgis, who as the production manager at Softwax Records in Philadelphia is in contact with the best is the biz on a regular basis. He suggested we reach out to Rob Carmichael at SEEN Studio, who had done a few beautiful covers for labels in our wheelhouse. This ended up being the kind of partnership I most enjoy. Rob was a big fan of our music and VHF, and we were in love with Rob’s ability create images that felt totally psychedelic without leaning on the 60s aesthetic. He took my photo and added layers of color and texture to create something rapturous and engaging. His artwork became a seamless extension of the music. We had come to our final destination.

In the end, The Red Valley discovered itself as we experimented and created something simultaneously new and timeless. But that still leaves the question of whether The Red Valley is a place or if it only exists in our minds? Is it a location in time or just a vibration, resonating for a moment before returning to nothing. Hopefully this music touches on a small piece of that question and hopefully you dig what we’re putting down. Thanks for listening.

– Jesse Sheppard

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