Ashen-faced by Ashburn County

+ 4 BONUS TRACKS & ART BY PURCHASING THE ALBUM

Here is the second recording of Ashburn County. This project was born in 2012.
We had been haunted for years by a small town in the Deep South of the US called Ashburn in which there were more churches than inhabitants. When we went there, we found no human souls, so we decided to imagine the lives, stories and folklore of the people living in what looked like a ghost town. At the same time, we were very much influenced by the literature of Faulkner (his imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha) or Flannery O'Connor, the photographic tradition of the Southern States and regional horror cinema. In this way, we draw a lot of our inspiration on traditions and we consider our music as "folk art".
The main influences for this second recording were the photographs of Louisiana artist Clarence John Laughlin (notably "Our Festering Hands Ruin all..." which is also a song on this record) and the horror films made in the seventies by a filmmaker from Texas named S.F. Brownrigg (notably "Don't Look in the Basement"). In Laughlin's work, we see a lot of widows dressed in black wandering amongst the ruins of old houses, while in Brownrigg's work, the stories take place most of the time inside houses where madness and perversion dwell everywhere. This gothic theme was very interesting for us, because in our music the objects are alive as much as the people. They have a spirit. Natural sounds and field recordings are part of the compositions as well as the other instruments.
Another important aspect was the relationship to an ever-present past and this idea of permanence, that past, present and future as one and the same thing. If our previous recording was very much influenced by landscapes and nature, this one is very different and much more claustrophobic. We focused on the legend of a haunted house named Shady Breeze and all the field recordings were done indoors. Even the storm was recorded behind closed shutters. To get this impression of ghostly atmosphere and haunted rooms, we decided to change a little bit our instrumentation and we used many classical instruments, and most notably the cello, mixed with our equipment of old analog synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and folk instruments (accordion, viola, flute, trombone, saxophone, etc.). Even more musicians were involved in these songs, including a metal percussionist, a children choir, an organist or a player of very primitive hand-made violin.

ASHBURN COUNTY is a French-American project that emerged in Louisiana in 2011.