Nathan Salsburg

★★★★ Landwerk No.2 NO QUARTER. DL/LP

Louisville guitarist experiments with hauntological folk

Mostly, Nathan Salsburg engages with the past in relatively straightforward fashion, as an archivist for the Alan Lomax Archives, and as a skilled explorer of folk traditions on a series of solo albums (when he’s not busy as Joan Shelley’s key accompanist). His Landwerk recordings, though, are an uncanny extrapolation of his knowledge and craft, where Salsburg calmly improvises over crackly loops sampled from old 78s. Source material for this bewitching second batch come from four 1920s sides: two klezmer; one Yiddish folk; and one by a Slovak miners’ orkestra from northeastern Pennsylvania – “home,” he notes, “of six generations of Salsburgs”. The results are eerie and hypnotic, but meditative rather than unnerving; a hermetic practice in which Salsburg makes profound musical and emotional connections with history in a way conventional revivalism could never do.