Festival for the Eno
Thursday, Jul. 4 & Saturday, Jul. 6, $18–$30
West Point on the Eno, Durham
The music of the British folk revivalists Dolly and Shirley Collins is often called psychedelic, although the sisters didn’t exactly align themselves with their more out-there peers of the sixties and seventies. Once, when pressured to drop acid, Dolly retorted that she didn’t need psychedelics to “see” a tree. Likewise, the duo saw traditional balladry as complex enough to stand on its own, with well-studied early music instrumentation. However, Dolly sometimes played a synthesizer; the drone of modern electronics roiling around curtals and cornetts. The combination showcased sung poetry in an open-ended way that was still reverent of its origins.
Sally Anne Morgan and Sarah Louise Henson, who make up the duo House and Land, are particularly attached to these records by the Collins sisters. While on tour before creating their latest album, Across the Field, they often listened to 1978’s For as Many as Will, eventually choosing the Collins’s version of “Blacksmith” to arrange with their own blend of drone and melody. Henson and Morgan, who both hail from Western North Carolina, have cultivated a set of favorite traditional songs over time, masterfully utilizing everything from fiddle and electric guitar to Shruti box and tin whistle. Although they’re not related, Henson and Morgan harmonize with all the tension and love of siblings.
At fortieth-annual Festival for the Eno, there are three opportunities to catch them in action, alongside about eighty other acts, many of them also based in North Carolina, including Chatham Rabbits, Boulevards, and Blue Cactus. In addition to their performance as House and Land, Morgan will play as part of The Black Twig Pickers, and Henson will continue her experimentations with modular synthesizer and guitar during a solo set. The two fit in well at a festival crafted around environmentalism and land conservation. Though her main job outside music is as a letterpress artist, Morgan has a degree in geology, and she once worked for Clean Water for North Carolina. Henson, meanwhile, is a budding herbalist who often shares cheerful videos about her adventures in making tinctures with milky oats and nettles. In a number of ways, they are kindred spirits.
“We were drawn to each other as not just as fans of the traditional songs and ballads, but also because it’s rare, in my experience, to find people like Sarah, who love music deeply but also widely,” says Morgan. “On our first tour, we ended up at the Big Ears Festival, because I was invited to play with this Tony Conrad orchestra. That cemented our kinship in minimalism and experimental music.”
For their second House and Land album, the duo also drew inspiration from the music of Swedish heavy psychedelic group Pärson Sound and its later incarnation, Träd, Gräs och Stenar, for their version of “The Lady Of Carlisle,” sometimes styled as “Carolina Lady.” They recorded an instrumental version instead of parroting lyrics that they found troubling. This isn’t an unusual practice for the pair; they’ve often tweaked songs that bore strains of misogyny or violence, which they feel is integral to the work of interpreting traditional songs.
“I don’t think of it as us imposing an agenda on songs, so much as treating them as living things that are adapting and changing through the times,” says Morgan.
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