Diggedy Derek said:
This guy seems to be involved in countless brilliant free-folky projects. A multi instrumentalist, his stuff with Hala Strana and Thuja involves countless layers of instrumentation, like layers of leaves in the forest canopy, incredibly lush and almost the feel of field recordings. Hala Strana is a more conceptual project, based around Eastern European melodies, whereas Thuja is more a sort of acoustic ambient supergroup featuring Loren Chasse among others. Incredibly dense and lush music.
Derek you knew I'd pipe up here didn't you...
...but Steven is maybe the best of the whole batch. I think he's quite separate to the free-folk thing actually. In retrospect Thuja are much closer to stuff like Mirror or AMM, though grittier sounding than either. The Hala Strana stuff is amazing, but I think Steven's best stuff is the two recent solo releases - "Crown of Marches" which gets so dense at times it's very Haino (Smith is a huge fan BTW) and "Kohl" which is an LP reissue of a Jewelled Antler CDR from 2002, which is gorgeous, stripped-back, incredible. He's the best.
A lot of the Hala Strana titles draw directly from Hungarian, Romanian etc folk music. (Of course if anything's close to 'free folk' it's the traditional music of these areas...) Smith's close to a scholar of this field, I've emailed him a lot about it and he's incredibly well versed and I think that knowledge base is what makes discs like "Fielding" so strong. But yeah, I can't recommend Steven's music enough. Lovely guy too.
Also check out Loren Chasse's solo project OF, two CDs on Jewelled Antler, feeding his field recordings/'activation of sites' discourse through brittle melodies and shifts in focus... Gorgeous.
(PS Derek I'm on holidays at the moment but when I get back to Adelaide I'll finally make those CDs for you.)
