Sluice with Alli Blois | January 27, 8 p.m. | The Pinhook, Durham 

When he was a kid, Justin Morris would leave home in Winston-Salem each summer for a family trip to Virginia. “On the old backroads, we’d pass a historical marker, and the marker was for Slink Shoal Sluice,” he recalls. Every summer, without a clue what it meant, he’d think, “That’s the craziest combination of words.” 

A sluice, Morris would soon learn, is a channel for controlling the flow of water. So captivating was the awkward, alliterative music of the historical marker that Sluice—capital S—became the name of Morris’s songwriting project in 2019. An obsession with water infrastructure abides: Radial Gate, his album released in March 2023, takes its title from an apparatus used in the spillways of dams.

According to the cosmology of Justin Morris, everything is water; listen to any song on Radial Gate and you’ll hear it. “I jump the bank a lanky otter,” he sings on “Fourth of July” over the twang of a pedal steel. “I am looking at water hitting water.” Even when Morris isn’t singing about rivers, his songs follow their fluid logic. Each gentle word floats like a raft downstream, meandering through scenes that form little eddies in the flow of narrative time. 

Morris through-composes his songs, forgoing verses and choruses. The result is a discography that feels like a collection of short stories, though Morris rarely fictionalizes. When he turns his writerly attention on a spot where the “river bends to a pool” on the song “Mill,” for example, you get the sense that he has a particular curve in mind, because he does. It’s next to Occoneechee Mountain.

“If I’m trying to write something that is true—quote-unquote true, whatever that means,” he tells me, “just talking about my experiences and where they happened is a route, for me, of getting close to achieving that.” 

Morris’s songs, rich with memory and close observation, are rooted in North Carolina’s landscape, and particularly in the semirural environs west of Durham where he lives. Once, Morris says, he was wading in the Eno River with his bandmate Oliver Child-Lanning and Child-Lanning’s partner when lightning struck the water. As it happened, they were all singing the Bill Callahan song “Drinking at the Dam.”

The story (too perfect to be made up) eventually became “Fourth of July”: “I am a cartoon Callahan,” Morris sings on the track, playfully acknowledging one of his most important influences. “I am the man getting struck by lightning.”

On a sunny January afternoon, I met Morris—tall, genial, a hugger rather than a hand-shaker—at the rental property he shares with Child-Lanning. The two had just finished a series of 12-hour recording sessions for the new Sluice record, alongside drummer Avery Sullivan and a few other collaborators, and were recuperating outside with coffee and archery. Standing on a grassy slope below a makeshift stage, Morris slotted an arrow into his recurve bow, drew back the string, and let go. 

Justin Morris, who performs as Sluice. Photo by Angelica Edwards.

Child-Lanning and his friend Walt sat in lawn chairs behind Morris. To their right was a goat pen with three residents: Pretty Saro, Tupelo, and Flora. Until recently, Morris and Child-Lanning built things for a living; the goat pen was their handiwork.

But a few months ago, following the success of Radial Gate (Pitchfork reviewed it positively, and The Guardian put it on a best-of-2023 list alongside the likes of Lana Del Rey and Lil Yachty), both quit their day jobs. This month, Sluice set out on their first headlining tour. 

“We’re both figuring out what being a quote-unquote full-time musician would be like,” Morris said, now sitting beside Child-Lanning. From the vantage of our lawn chairs, with the afternoon sun on the meadow grass, being a full-time musician didn’t look so bad: archery, fresh air, a few goats. (“It’s like sitting at the beach,” Walt quipped.) 

The whole music thing has not all been a beach for Morris, though. When he was younger, he imagined a future for himself as a working musician; he studied music technology at UNC-Asheville, where he met future collaborator Alli Rogers (who performs as Alli Blois and engineered Radial Gate) and the members of Wednesday. But by his midtwenties, Morris was “explicitly in a state of despair about music.” When he released his first album as Sluice, in 2019, he defiantly posted it online with no promotion: “art for art’s sake.” 

Radial Gate’s positive reception has been “incredibly validating,” Morris says—especially among fellow musicians in North Carolina’s lively scene, of which he has become an integral part. When he’s not performing as Sluice, Morris plays in the Durham band Fust and in Weirs, his and Child-Lanning’s experimental-folk duo. 

“A rich community is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time,” he explains, “and I feel like it exists, which I’m incredibly grateful for.” 

In December, Sluice opened for Asheville’s Angel Olsen at a packed Haw River Ballroom. It was the last day of the tour, and when I spoke to Morris, shortly before the show, he confessed to feeling a little exhausted. Thirty minutes later, none of that was evident. Morris and his bandmates—Child-Lanning on bass, Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle—worked the crowd into a trance with “Ostern,” Radial Gate’s instrumental opener, which builds slowly toward a sublime conflux. Morris and Sullivan grinned at each other. The audience looked on, rapt and remarkably quiet.

Haw River Ballroom, a converted cotton mill on the bank of the Haw, was a fitting venue for Sluice. A sluice, like a mill, is “something very industrial, and kind of ugly, that has to do with something very natural and very beautiful and very lifegiving,” Morris tells me. ”Exploring where those lines can blur a little bit is interesting.” That night, while Morris sang about spillways and swimming, river water slid by in the darkness at a rate of 100 cubic feet per second. 

The songs on Radial Gate tend to inhabit messy riparian ecosystems where the human and the nonhuman converge, where beer cans get caught in cattails. “I’ve had no revelations in the wilderness,” Morris admits on “Acts 9:3”—maybe because wilderness has become somewhat of a fantasy in the Anthropocene. 

In the same song, Morris is walking toward Damascus when Jesus appears in a flash of light. Here’s the catch: It’s basically a true story, like all of Sluice’s songs. It turns out that Morris was hiking on the Appalachian Trail toward Damascus, Virginia, near the border with Tennessee, and the Jesus character was actually a guy who stopped at a trail crossing to chat, share a couple beers, and offer Morris some oxycodone. The flash of light was the guy’s Ram truck glinting in the sun. 

When the truth is as interesting as it is, “we should just say exactly what happened,” Morris insists. “There’s no reason to obfuscate that.” The real world is never pure in Sluice’s wry but sincere songs, but it is always beautiful.

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