Name: Whole and Cloven
Brand: Nathan Bowles

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Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

pob028cd

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Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

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Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2016-08-31

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

pob028lp

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Standard:20

616892369646

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1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Nathan Bowles

Genre GB

Country / Americana

Label GB

Paradise of Bachelors

Nathan Bowles is a multi-instrumentalist musician and teacher based in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. He is known for his exploration of Appalachian old-time traditions and minimalist drone music, showcasing his virtuosic banjo skills. As a member of the Black Twig Pickers, he immerses himself in local folk music and dance traditions. Additionally, Bowles has collaborated with various artists including Steve Gunn, Jack Rose, and Hiss Golden Messenger. His second solo album Nansemond showcases his inventive playing style on banjo, percussion, piano, tapes, and vocals.

Bowles' unique sound combines traditional Appalachian stringband music with contemporary improvised and post-minimalist avant-garde elements. His hypnotic recordings seamlessly integrate tradition-bearing masters like Dock Boggs and Etta Baker with experimental compositional techniques inspired by Paul Metzger and Henry Flynt.

With an extensive discography spanning collaborations across genres, Nathan Bowles continues to push boundaries while respectfully blurring the lines between Southern vernacular music and modernism.

Paradise of Bachelors is a record label, company, and archive based in North Carolina. With a passion for preserving and promoting *authentic* music, the label has become a trusted source for music enthusiasts worldwide.

Founded with the aim of supporting independent artists and showcasing their talent, Paradise of Bachelors has built a reputation for releasing high-quality records across various genres. From folk to country, blues to rock, the label's diverse roster ensures there is something for every music lover.

With an unwavering commitment to exceptional sound quality and artistic integrity, Paradise of Bachelors consistently delivers unique listening experiences. By collaborating closely with its artists throughout the creative process, the label fosters an environment that allows musicians to fully express themselves.

Since his last album Nansemond (2014), Bowles has sustained and strengthened his fruitful relationships as a ensemble player with Steve Gunn (drums, piano and organ, banjo); the Black Twig Pickers (banjo, percussion); and Pelt (struck and bowed percussion), while undertaking projects with new accomplice Jake Xerxes Fussell and old friend and mentor Michael Chapman, all of which inform this record. But he has also continued to refine his solo practice, carrying it far beyond the confines of any reductive and rote solo banjo designations. On this third solo album, his most exquisite, immersive, and ambitious to date, he again augments his mesmeric clawhammer banjo pieces with piano, percussion, and vocals (mostly wordless, some wordy). The result showcases the full range of Bowles' compositional and performative versatility. Instead of the programmatic place-based narratives of Nansemond, the seven songs on Whole &amp; Cloven offer a stoic meditation on absence, loss, and fragmentation, populating those experiential gaps - the weighty interstices and places in-between - with stillness and wonder. Whereas its predecessor was directly inspired by the mutating environment, and his mutating memories, of his childhood home on the fringes of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, the new album turns inward, exploring inscapes rather than landscapes. Since Nansemond, Bowles has moved from the mountains of Blacksburg, Virginia - his longtime home - to the Piedmont city of Durham, North Carolina, an uprooting and displacement that perhaps precipitated the divergent iterations and forking paths on display here. Album centerpiece "I Miss My Dog" contains teeming multitudes of memory and regret in its eleven vaporous minutes, crawling from stately, deep-water soundings to torrents of hiccupping, densely woven banjo and piano latticework redolent of anxious longing. It sounds like storm-blown rain. As a whole (ahem), Whole &amp; Cloven repeatedly swaps lenses, wide angle for macro, demonstrating a new comfort with long shots and close-ups alike. Straddling Appalachian string band music and avant-garde composition but beholden to neither idiom, Nathan proves himself heir to deconstructivist tradition-bearers like Henry Flynt and Jack Rose. 140g virgin vinyl LP with heavy-duty 24-point reverse board matte jacket (featuring artwork by John Henry Toney), printed inner sleeve &amp; DL.

Whole and Cloven

Music GB