Nathan Salsburg, the folk guitarist and archivist, has a lovely new album out today. Ipsa Corpora is one standalone 40-minute composition, a serene acoustic symphony for one. Salsburg, who has lately been undertaking projects like writing new arrangements for Hebrew psalms and building new musical worlds atop old 78 rpm records, thought he would never make another folk guitar record. But the fragments for this one "arrived in a torrent, overwhelming my abilities to keep them straight."
Salsburg continues:
I thought that imagining them as individuals, like characters in a play, could be a useful mnemonic, so I tried assigning an identity to each, poaching from gauzy memories of long-dead relatives. These arbitrary associations failed. The new pieces couldn’t correspond to the old apparitions. They were real — subjects in themselves, paradoxically, synesthetically, embodied in sound. I wasn’t happy with this conclusion but I couldn’t shake it, and as more pieces of the eventual whole revealed themselves over the following months, the effect became like guests arriving: like physical visitation, when the air in a room is ruffled and displaced as a body moves into and through it.
He recorded Ipsa Corpora at Nada Studio in Chicago with his frequent collaborator James Elkington serving as engineer. Listen to the album below.
Ipsa Corpora is out now via No Quarter. Buy it here.
