Counterclockwise

Description

Faun Fables, the long-running collaboration between Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl, have returned with Counterclockwise, the followup to 2016s Born of the Sun. With the longest space between albums in the bands twenty-seven-year history, the nature of time and experience spent raising a family and negotiating lifes changes have much to do with the incredible listening companion Faun Fables have gifted us here. Counterclockwises songs and production are the most encompassing, richly lived-in sonic world of their seven full-length albums. From start to finish, it is an exquisitely etched portrait of their aesthetic and worldview: colourfully studded with fine-hewed jewels of song, tinged with the traditional sounds of past and future nations. Their timeless songtelling practice is entwined with a holistic view of a life in music embracing and celebrating the mundane details of home, partnering and family, elevated by a mystical and fantastical perspective. The new discovery here is their creative relationship with time. As Dawn notes in the album liner: Time the most fertile & playful of mediums, though full of mist We mustnt forget time offers itself first as something to be creatively shaped. Counterclockwise is the first Faun Fables album engineered and produced by Dawn and Nils from start to finish. Taking the wheel in the tradition of the engineers that taught them, they have created a living atmosphere of songs and family. The chiming and twinkling of bells throughout evokes the richness of the years and the passage of time. Highlighting the spirit of play, Nils brings his multi-instrumental vision (as heard in Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Free Salamander Exhibit), contributing on guitar, bass, flutes, voice, glockenspiel, drums, harmonium, trombone and tenor sax. Dawn and Nils wide-ranging vocal harmony tradition is enriched by the voices of their daughters Edda, Ura and Gurdrin, who contribute on keyboards and percussion as well. Norwegian guitarist Arild Hammerø lends his singular guitar craft on the songs Ember Bell, Hiawatha, Wonderous Stories (on which he also sings) and Maybe, as well as the final, essential sounds that close the album. Dedicated with love to Dawns late father, Edward Will McCarthy, Counterclockwise is an evocation of the essential truth and joy of Faun Fables relationship with time, the greatest value they can imagine to give to anyone who listens to their music.