The Rheingans Sisters release their highly anticipated new album Start Close In on September 27th. Sonically arresting, drenched in drones, and pulsing with age-old patterns of communal dancing, Start Close In continues the current rejuvenation of traditional folk music with a record steeped in minimalism, collectivism, beauty and noise.
Produced by the Juno-nominated, contemporary composer Adam Pietrykowski, Start Close In comes four years after Anna and Rowan Rheingans’ last album Receiver, which reached #2 in the Transglobal World Music Charts, was one of Songlines Magazine’s Top Ten Essential Folk Albums of 2020, and was described by Folk Radio as “a masterpiece of modern folk music” for its bewitching blend of Norwegian fiddle music, songs in Occitan, and true stories from the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement.
On their new record, the multi-instrumentalist Rheingans Sisters weave between the dissonance of John Cale and the delicacy of chamber music; using violin, viola, tambourin à cordes, 5-string banjo, gourd banjo, flabuta, electric guitar, jaw harp, bones, triangle, and foot percussion. They’re joined on three tracks by saxophonist Daniel Thorne.
The album begins with the duo’s interpretation of the traditional English ballad The Devil And The Farmer’s Wife, inspired by Frankie Armstrong’s 1978 subversion of the song’s usually negative depiction of the female protagonist. That's complimented by the songs Un Voltigeur and Si Sabiatz Drolletas; both, in a way, warnings for women to remain independent and free. The former (still sung in the polyphonic singing communities of the Pyrenees) was translated and rewritten by Anna, who contributes her own song about “manmade and natural things that evolve and erode as time passes” with Old Neptune. Rowan’s Drink Up seeks joy amidst our “mundane-meets-apocalyptic” times, while the mantra of Over & Over Again acts as “a medicine; a way to cope” with witnessing war and genocide unfold on social media. Even the instrumental tunes on this record, whether learned from other folk musicians, composed or improvised, reflect a desire to return to the joy of collective movement as an antidote to anxiety about the state of the world.
“We wrote this album as if ‘on stage’ with the physicality and energy of performing there from the very beginning” says Anna. “it’s in live performance that music becomes this vital, playful, energiser. This feels closer to the collective experience of folk music as we know it - as social music, as work music, as dance music”
The album takes its title from a poem by the Anglo-Irish poet and philosopher David Whyte; a work loved by the sisters because, as Rowan explains, “It speaks to a human tendency to try and make a masterpiece when what’s really needed is connecting closer to the immediate and everyday, which is also sometimes where you can find magic and multitudes of meaning.”
Start Close In is a radical and regenerative record; political, meditative, propelling, global, local, traditional, and experimental - a music only The Rheingans Sisters could make, but unlike anything they’ve made before.
Tim Chipping
Songlines 'Top of the World' Album * * * * *
"Superb" - The Independent
"Quite simply extraordinary" fRoots