"Common Wealth" by Bird By Snow
“Common Wealth” is Bird By Snow’s 4th LP, and their 1st record made outside of their own lo-fi home studio. But Bird By Snow stays true to their analog roots by conducting ceremony with tape alchemist Tim Green who recorded and produced this album and has cast countless other magic spells with artists such as Joanna Newsom, Daniel Higgs, Wolves in the Throne Room, and a multitude more. This LP comes on deluxe heavy white vinyl, with a beautifully printed color jacket, and 8-page color 10" booklet! All together in this photo.
“Common Wealth” is a watershed of song, an album of arrangements that behave more like an ecosystem. The interdependence of the instruments that dwell in the wilds of this record give the impression that the sounds here create themselves and all other sounds simultaneously.
This album begins when a shaker wakes in the darkness, the first sign of approaching warmth, like spring thaw on a frozen river. The icy shaker that floats on the water is joined by skin drums resounding from the hillside, and by pump-organs migrating over-head with geese. The cirrus clouds are spectral piano trills; the marching cumulous clouds, piano bass-lines. Steel drums, autoharps, vibraphones and dulcimers burst suddenly from under rocks like crawfish. Voices high and mellow dance on the surface of the water with flecks of sunlight. The boulders churning in the deepest pools are the bass, the cymbals, and a thundering gong. And the flow of the river itself, the invisible energy, is guitars, electric and nylon. This river flows between an ancient glacier and a vast ocean. The mind glacier melts into poetry, lyrics that travel with those sound sediments back to the source: the endless ocean of gratitude, and openness.
This is how “Common Wealth” passes from vinyl to needle to speaker to you and beyond, as a river passes through the world.
Tracklist
| 1. | Wobbly Legs | 7:18 |
| 2. | Friends in the City | 4:42 |
| 3. | One White Flag | 5:21 |
| 4. | There is a Marriage | 4:57 |
| 5. | As we are now | 3:01 |
| 6. | Without Reaching | 4:01 |
| 7. | Across the Water | 5:52 |
Credits
License
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Gnome Life Records is a vinyl and cassette label based on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Esselen in present day Big Sur, California. Established in 2005, Gnome Life produces a wide variety of musical and poetic releases expressing wild and mystical perspectives.