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  Glenn Donaldson plays in a whole slew of phenomenal bands — the Skygreen Leopards, the Blithe Sons, Thuja, the Franciscan Hobbies and about a half-dozen others — releasing them on Jewelled Antler, the label he co-founded, and numerous others. His vast and engaging creative output covers everything from field recordings and found sounds to plaintive pop to wide-eyed, drooling psychedelia and remains engaging and compelling. But to these ears, his most affecting work comes from the so-called "-tree" recordings, credited to either The Birdtree or The Ivytree (there have been compilation tracks credited to the Olivetree and one can imagine other potential -tree names are in the works), which take all these threads and knit them together into a expressive and focused whole. Winged Leaves, the Ivytree follow-up to the 2003's Orchards & Caravans (credited to The Birdtree — stay with me here), again finds Donaldson brewing a potent and unique style of acid folk balanced with incidental and instrumental pieces that focus on field recordings and less traditionally structured pieces. The songs here are based on guitar and voice improvisations and fleshed out with layers of bowed bouzouki, banjo, and dulcimer, along with organ and percussion. There is a distant melancholy in these songs, a mournfulness that somehow manages to be stately and tuneful in the rumble of sounds passing by. Donaldson's voice accounts for much of this: his echoing, wordless (or, at the very least, indecipherable) falsetto cuts through the layers, like the summer sun poking through a dark canopy of leaves above. But what's really at the heart of Winged Leaves
is space — the warmth and ambience of the places where Donaldson
actually sat down to capture these songs and sounds. When not recording
at his house, Donaldson recorded much of Winged Leaves outside
in places like Big Sur and the Marin Headlands using acoustic or
battery powered instruments. Much has been made of these unorthodox
recording techniques and though they are easy to dismiss, the natural
sounds (birds, the rushing of wind and creaking of branches) add
a depth and sense of Edition of 1000 copies in hand assembled, letterpressed chipboard digipaks, with full color tipped-on cover image and poster insert of Donaldson's dizzying collage work. |
