Hang onto your guitar straps cause there’s a new Daniel Bachman album Axacan coming May 7 via Three Lobed Records!!

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, hopefully you’re familiar with Bachman’s work. While his earlier 10s output was more straightforward American Primitive style acoustic guitar playing, albeit with rather lo-fi recording quality, in 2015 his album River really marked a new direction for him, adding in elements of quiet introspection, emotional dynamics and zen-like noise meditations. Bachman then level-upped with his 2018 album The Morning Star, a record that fully embraced a new experimental sound with plenty of field recordings to amp up the overall atmosphere of each piece, but also added a new sonic depth that normal instruments can’t achieve. I loved it.

Axacan definitely builds on what Bachman has built over the last half decade and it might be my favorite thing he’s done yet. It’s a somber meditation on the last year, with the first single “Coronach” being directly about western society’s failings on dealing with COVID and the ache of loss we’ve all felt over the last 365+ days. The rest of the record continues a similar bleak path, dark and dirge-like interspersed with unsettling field recordings of construction, static AM radio interference, and more uncanny noise. It’s American folk music haunted by ghosts of the past, present and future. Pretty spooky. But oh so good.

Again – Axacan comes out May 7 via Three Lobed. Pre-order the record HERE.