tiMOTHy
solo music:
"Every Fallen Leaf an Angel's Wing" CDr available now
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click image to order via Dark Holler
This long-lost set of songs, recorded in 2005, is the bridge between Stone Breath’s acid folk and Crow Tongue’s tribal drone. Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist for both bands, tiMOTHy presents here a set of songs dealing with mystical and magical trees. Holy trees; haunted trees; tree spirits; praying leaves and more. Sparse acoustic folk opens up the album, then quickly turns into deep drones and extended improvisation, broken rhythms and chant.
Track listing:
1. Heartwood Eidolon
2. Black Walnut Tree
3. Holy Spring
4. Oakheart Halfghost
5. St. Michael Beneath the Leaves
6. Wake Nicodemus
"Primitive Recordings" CDr available now.
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click image to order via Dark Holler
A stark album in the spirit of Johnny Cash's American releases. Primitive Recordings features tiMOTHy (Renner) seated in front of a single microphone, armed with only a homemade cigar box banjo. Gone are the drone textures and psychedelic spoken word excursions of his last few recordings...this is what Renner sounds like on a back porch in the quiet hours of the night as moths dance around the flame. Renner's right hand scratches out powerful clawhammer riffs in perfect syncopation as his rich baritone voice summons the dead. This is a deep album.
His cigar box banjo is based on an instrument dating back to the 1870's...a simple wood cigar box, plank of wood and 5 banjo strings. It's creaky and dusty sounding. In other words, perfect for the spirituals and murder ballads he plays on this disc. There are no special effects and no overdubs...just singer and banjo (and maybe a few ghosts in the background). Also included is the bonus track, Two White Horses, performed by Renner on a 3-string cigar box guitar.
Insurrection Records is known for its cigar box guitar cds and homemade packaging. The cd is packaged in Insurrection's "PovertyPak" cardstock case.
track listing:
1• Angeline
2• Little Sadie
3• The Queen of All the Gypsies
4• Dyin' Bed
5• Pretty Polly
6• Haunted Road Blues
7• The Valley
8• Summer's Night
9• Lazy Farmer
10• Friday Morning
11• Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down
12• The Cuckoo Bird
13• Curtains of Night
14• Two White Horses
"Hoofbeat, Caw & Thunder" CDr available now.
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click image to order via Dark Holler
On Old Christmas Eve and Old Christmas Day, January 2006, Timothy, Revelator, having had on his mind thoughts of the death of Time; and in his ears and eyes, great gatherings of crows wherever he went; and in his heart his twin children; sat down, put pen to paper, and wrote "Hoofbeat, Caw, & Thunder." In two days' and two nights' time, thoughts and hopes and fears began to spin together like a spider's web, and he produced what is perhaps his most personal work to date. Biblical and personal revelation blend as animist apocrypha is reconciled to Catholic Apocalypse, disappointment to hope, past to future. All these thoughts of ENDING blending with the demise of Stone Breath (Timothy's now defunct band), and the fact that he has not released an album in well over a eighteen months' time, lent this material a sense of urgency and he began to put it to music immediately (perhaps, in his mind, before The End).
With a host of instruments at hand (guitars, banjos, dulcimers, harmonium, lute, and something Timothy calls the motheart), he began to compose songs and drones to marry to his text. Besides bowed strings and blown harmonium reeds, Timothy created drones from field recordings he made of steam engines and whistles from various antique engine shows (another anachronistic interest of Timothy's); as well as recordings of the loudest instrument in the world, the factory steam whistle in York, PA, which is played every Christmas at midnight and heard for many miles around. He recruited friends Sarada, whose silvery vocals have graced many of Timothy's previous albums, and Shane Speal, the King of the Cigar Box Guitar, to help. Sarada sang with Timothy while Shane played a double-necked bass/guitar cigar box and a fretless electric bass.
"Hoofbeat, Caw, & Thunder" was meant to be taken as one piece (though divided into tracks for the convenience of the listener) and the sound weaves elements of Timothy's past with hints at his future musical direction. Not steampunk exactly, but steamdrone and folk (wyrd or otherwise), sometimes with distorted dissonance, and other times in quieter, acoustic lead settings. In this, Time has turned in on itself; where sounds of medieval lutes meet 1970's tube-driven recording equipment, and 1880's steam whistles are sampled, reconstructed, and looped by modern devices. "Hoofbeat, Caw, & Thunder," with sonic leaps back and forth through Time, becomes a meditation on the end of all things, or perhaps of just one man, and on love, and family, and what we leave behind.
9 tracks, 58 minutes.
