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Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine

by Nate May, Ben Townsend

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1.
Side A - Ben Townsend 29:58
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2.
Side B - Nate May 20:12
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NORTH RIVER MILLS, WV—Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine, the new split release from Ben Townsend and Nate May on Questionable Records, is a sweeping and surreal examination of a single old tune from the mountains.

On the first side, Ben Townsend (fiddle) joins forces with his brother Jim (piano) along with local old-time couple Sam and Joe Hermann (hammered dulcimer and fiddle) to give "Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine" a hypnotizing, expansive treatment, an outgrowth of a performance of Terry Riley's minimalist classic "In C" by old-time musicians at the Clifftop festival that Townsend organized in 2014. “On one hand it was like a theme and variations on the tune," writes Jim Townsend, "and on the other hand it was like a complicated puzzle to put together."

The second side is composer Nate May's psychological exploration of the tune's medium and message. Beginning with a slow sculpting of white noise that settles on the shore of Bonaparte's river, the soundscape is gently displaced by a small hive of Fender Rhodes pianos before climaxing in a blinding, buzzing polyphonic digitization of the material from side one. May writes, "The last part happened when I was first learning Ableton. I dropped in Ben's audio and somehow it ended up glitched out and sort of bitcrushed but with a metronomic pulse. I started tweaking and layering it and it produced these stunning golden chords with bits of the melody cascading through the voices."

With references reaching from West Virginia's Hammons family to William Basinski and Tristan Perich, the album joins Bonnie Prince Billy, Brian Harnetty, Anna and Elizabeth, and others in the growing body of work at the intersection of the traditional and the experimental. Like these artists, it is the outcome of decades of respectful study of tradition merged with an approach to the present that seeds alien landscapes with earthly memory.

Both raised in West Virginia, Townsend and May first met at a shared bill organized by Anna Roberts-Gevalt (Anna & Elizabeth) at the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn. Deeply knowledgeable of the mountain musics of West Virginia, Townsend had been exploring minimalist refractions of traditional material, while May, enrolled in Yale's doctoral program in composition, had developed an interest in both the roots and misunderstandings of Appalachian music.

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released December 2, 2021

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Questionable Records West Virginia

Traditional and Experimental music from the mountains and valleys of West Virginia.

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