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Tim Eriksen
Every Sound Below
$16.99

Eriksen is rapidly becoming one of America's most important folk singers (as opposed to songwriter-singers), a man with a real grasp of the language and nuance of rural sounds, yet with a personal and orignal delivery. This is a collection of traditional songs.

Press from the record label:
“I’m interested in connections,” writes Tim Eriksen in the liner notes to his long awaited second solo CD, Every Sound Below. Tim’s concept of music as a link between the past and present, between individuals and communities, between the world’s spirit and his own, has led him to the ten traditional American folk ballads he reanimates here and the four haunting original compositions that round out this microcosmic view of pre-20th Century life and its 21st Century resonance.

Music’s power to transcend time and place has already drawn Tim to a spectrum of genres that includes the historic Sacred Harp/shape note singing style he arranged and conducted for the Oscar-nominated “Cold Mountain” movie soundtrack, on which he’s also the featured vocalist on three traditional songs; creating “folk noise” as the leader of the internationally feted Cordelia’s Dad; studying and performing Indian, Ethiopian, Bosnian, and Balkan music; even raising the roof of Lincoln Center with experimental sounds. One of Tim’s original songs from his self-titled Appleseed debut, “I Love Music,” is scheduled for use in an upcoming Billy Bob Thornton movie, “Chrystal”; another track, “I Wish the Wars Were All Over” has found steady radio airplay for its timely pathos. Regardless of its source, Tim views music as “an interaction with the future that views ‘now’ as the past, and the past as ‘now.’”

That Tim may be the only performer to have shared a stage with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson is an indication of his contemporary appeal and audience. On Every Sound Below, Tim brings sounds of the American past into the “now,” starting with the first track, “The Stars Their Match,” an original a cappella salute to sunrise in the strong, brave tenor voice that has won him awe in folk circles. He follows with two chilling accounts of the Civil War (“The Southern Girl’s Reply,” “The Cumberland and the Merrimac”), the hopeful lament of a traveling preacher in 1810 (“John Colby’s Hymn,” one of two songs utilizing harmonic, “overtone” singing that imitates the buzz of nature), murder ballads (“Omie Wise,” “Two Sisters”), and sprinkles in a pair of instrumentals (the twinkling banjo original “Bassett Creek” and the traditional fiddle tune, “The Soldier’s Return”). Several songs were drawn from Frank and Anne Warner’s field recordings of East Coast traditional music, which Tim was instrumental in persuading Appleseed to release on two CDs (see bio). Tim has a scholar’s instinct for uncovering obscure and often unrecorded folks songs, and his liner notes give a fascinating insight into their history and his own sensibilities. Tim’s two other compositions on Every Sound Below are the enigmatic “A Tiny Crown,” a fragmented tale of imagination, reality and sea monkeys, and the eerie, hovering title song, a walk through moonlit soundscapes of memory and matter Using the same minimal, live-in-the-studio technique as on his first CD in 2001, Tim performs alone here, cycling between guitar, banjo, and fiddle without overdubs, a stark approach in keeping with the direct connections between Tim, his music and his listeners, whose numbers include British folk master Martin Carthy, old-time folk performer and expert John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, and T Bone Burnett, musical producer of the surprise hit bluegrass-packed soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” “Cold Mountain” and “Down from the Mountain.” In May and June 2004, Tim will join many of the musicians from those soundtracks, featuring old-time music icon Ralph Stanley, the young queen of bluegrass, Alison Krauss and her Union Station band, and, accompanying Tim on four songs, Riley Baugus and Dirk Powell, on the “Great High Mountain Tour” in more than two dozen cities.