Search - Tim Eriksen :: Every Sound Below

Another starkly gorgeous CD from one of the great ones

Ethan Hein | New York, NY USA | 08/03/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"What a pleasure to be sitting here listening to a new austerely beautiful and enigmatic CD from one of my favorite musicians in the world. It's amazing to me that Tim can sound so individual and idiosyncratic within the self-imposed confines of his stark, traditional sonic palette. The only analogy I can think of would be Bjork doing a whole album accompanied solely by harpsichord and viola de gamba.



As usual, Tim's voice is arrestingly intense, sometimes even desperate, but always with that deadpan Appalachian affect that conveys a kind of weather-beaten optimism. And as usual, his guitar and banjo playing are intricate, driving, sometimes hypnotically repetitive, sometimes jagged, always lush and transporting. He makes self-deprecating comments about his fiddle playing in the liner notes, but it's becoming more confident, and its dry tone suits his hymnal material well. He's broadened his vocal technique in subtle ways as well, with more whistling, humming and overtone singing than on his previous recordings.



Tim always gets me shaking my head in awe at the little details in his music. The guitar arpeggio and hummed line that open A Tiny Crown manage to be ominously dissonant and delicately graceful at the same time. And that's the first three seconds - I've been listening to it over and over trying to wrap my head around the rest of it. In John Colby's Hymn, listen to the way he extends the word "share" into overtone singing. On Careless Love and other tunes, listen to the way he lets notes a half-step apart ring on adjacent strings of the guitar - it should be dark and conflicting, but like Thelonious Monk's chords, it's so wrong it's right. Listen to the spitting, thumping sound he gets from his fingerpicking. If ever an artist deserved a much bigger audience than they have, Tim is that artist. Anyone with the remotest interest in "folk" or singer-songwriter music owes it to themselves to listen to this CD and its predecessors. I'm certainly looking forward to whatever else this cat has coming down the pike.

"

Beauty and terror

Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 05/31/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There is no finer young singer of traditional American music than Tim Eriksen. His performance is austere, even demanding, and it is more chill wind than warm breeze. He sings inside a 19th Century of sheer existential intensity, conjuring up visions of a Southern church of Sacred Harp singers or a blood-soaked Civil War battlefield or a murderer's icy heart, and confronting life at its most elemental in its friendships, loves, hates, mortality, and fate. His gaze is straight, and it never flinches.Eriksen's repertoire mostly eschews familiar titles from the American folk canon. Only "Careless Love," "Two Sisters," and "Omie Wise" leap to easy recognition, though his readings of each are distinctive. The first, however, is one of the rare moments that betray Eriksen's linkage to the modern folk revival. The languid arrangement brings to mind the work of the brilliant (though sadly no longer active) British ballad singer/guitarist Nic Jones. The original "A Tiny Crown" is slightly reminiscent of another British folk guitarist, Bert Jansch (or, for that matter, the early, Jansch-besotted Donovan, before he went all wacky). You need not have heard of Jones or Jansch to be moved -- or, more likely, unsettled -- by what Eriksen does with these songs.In the purely technical or aural sense the sound is crisp as a gorgeous fall day. Yes, the album was recorded in the basement studio of my old friend, the Twin Cities guitarist and producer Dakota Dave Hull, but I would admire it wherever it came from. If 2004 ushers into the world a superior example of hard-core folk at its most brilliantly flinty, I will be very, very surprised."

Awesome voice!

Christina Shaw | 09/08/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've seen Tim in person and he comes across just as well in person. I love this CD!"