Album Notes

The last in Hand/Eye’s Stone Breath expanded reissues. “The Silver Skein Unwound” is rural acid folk, informed by the furrowed fields and green forests, shaded by falling leaves and falling dreams; time-worn, weird, blood-red, rattled and ragged. Sparse in places with thick tangled drones in others, aged in mouldy oak barrels for flavor, hidden from the sun, decayed, withdrawn. Here expanded with a previously unreleased song from the same sessions – includes the original illuminated color lyric booklet housed in special packaging.

reviews:

“Timothy "The Revelator" Renner doesn't claim to be the "indisputable master" of his genre. He needn't do so, since his vision is so strong and lucid that the music is its own testimony. Every Stone Breath album has been stronger than the last, yet this fourth opus leaps beyond even such promising precedent, establishing Renner, Prydwyn and Sarada as avatars of a truly singular folk-magic consciousness. Their silver skein, wound with threads of Gnostic Christian dogma, Green Man myth, Egyptian mysticism, Gaian lore and the all-conquering spirit of love, gets brighter every day.” - Gil Gershman reviewing “The Silver Skein Unwound” on fakejazz.com (#1 album pick for 2003)

“This is the fourth, magnificent CD by Stone Breath from the US. This group plays earthy acoustic psychedelic folk and they are absolutely one of the best among the contemporary masters of the genre. Their music has a dark quality and it's rather minimal and touching. The male/female vocals work fine. You can sense the vast, gloomy forests and nature and a certain closeness of death. This is very mystical and magical stuff. The band has been compared to for example The Incredible String Band and Current 93, and not without a reason. On this album, they have used among other things guitar, banjo, whistles, flutes, dulcimer, harmonium and melodica as instruments. The lyrics and the cover art complement perfectly the mystical atmosphere offered by the music. Stone Breath seems to have some kind of a hidden, ancient knowledge that they want to share with their music with everyone who's ready to hear it. The Silver Skein Unwound is an excellent album, and if you're into psychedelic folk music you definitely should check this out. ‘Darkness calls itself light, and the true light is called darkness’.” - Psychotropic Zone website

Now that Abunai! and John Fahey have tragically shuffled off into musical history, Stone Breath may be my favorite American psych band (although Austin's own Primordial Undermind, on a good night, comes close). I certainly can't think right offhand of anybody else doing this as consistently and as well. As usual, the Camera Obscura seal of approval turns out to be frightening in its reliability. Stone Breath are a trio of Timothy the Revelator (guitar, vox, other stuff, vision thing), Sarada (vox, flute, etc.), and Prydwyn (harmonium, vox, flute, etc.) playing old-school country death folk music with a distinctly psychedelic flavor. They're not complete purists -- they include a snowbound preacher's rant in the introduction and background of "A Bottle of Breath," a move worthy of Fahey as much as Godspeed You Black Emperor! -- but they're not generally inclined to deviate from the old-school sound and reliance solely on acoustic instruments. The fat-ass booklet is literally a work of art; with the exception of the credits page, the pages are lovely and sometimes inscrutable paintings that include the lyrics and titles in the artwork (the same is also true of the tray). Just like the sound on the disc inside, the packaging is as elaborately homemade as you can get in the age of mass production. The sound itself is as mysterious and of another time (the same time chronicled in, say, the AMERICAN FOLKWAYS collection) as its packaging. Bonus points: My drummer, normally the harshest critic of all that he hears, raved to no end about the album's genius after hearing it. (I think he wants to "indefinitely borrow" it, actually.) - RKF in Dead Angel zine

“Good folk music is inherently demonic.” Dusted scribe Dan Ruccia authored this dark declaration during his review of the latest offering by flowery/frightening Philadelphia folk trio, Espers. It’s a canny claim – if a mite monochromatic – but one certainly supported by the archly acoustic illuminations of like-mindedly pastoral Pennsylvanians, Stone Breath. However, unlike Espers’ floating world of subdued, effervescent menace, Stone Breath wear hand-hewn runes of eerie animism and anti-Christ affiliations on their twig-torn cloak sleeves.
The band birthed back in ’95, but today’s Stone Breath draws its lifeblood from the (un)holy trinity of Timothy Renner, Prywdwyn, and Sarada. Of course, whatever lineup reconfigurations the group’s undergone seem to signify little, as The Silver Skein Unwound unfurls the same sort of cryptic, pre–or post–pagan banner which waves within earlier LPs (Long Prayers?) like Lanterna Lucis Viriditatis and A Silver Thread to Weave the Seasons. Renner runs the unconventional convent, intoning his stark, severe incantations with monastic rigor while also plucking at a host of occult instruments ranging from the bouzouki to the headless-horsefiddle to the ektara. Prywdwyn plays the harmonium, flute, and viola, and whistles like a forlorn farmwife when occasion demands, and often sings high, lonesome, bereft-nun accompaniment with Sarada – who further pitches in with some subtle, sporadic guitar textures. Yet, despite all the stringed esoterica, the troupe arranges this gypsy wagon-worth of wares into rather sparse parts and parcels, lacing frailly dancing banjo lines with thin, whispering woodwinds into the sort of stern, empty minstrels Current 93 might hypothetically favor after black mass lets out.
Curiously, Stone Breath are dogged by the “acid-folk” tag, which couldn’t be more of a misnomer, as the spirits they evoke emanate from a far older, colder age than that of lysergic acid diethylamide labs. For Renner and crew, the crushing gloom of the death-heavy Dark Ages is still seriously relevant, even today, amidst our office building-dotted skylines and highway-veined countryside. Lyrically, they proffer the wisdom that, antiquated or otherwise, no intensity can surmount or even compete with the vision of a figure vanishing into green trees, the perfect harmony of circling birds, or the simple sound of earth covering earth. Truly, nothing is psychedelic in Stone Breath’s mentality save the inevitable mind-expansion incurred by an awareness of mortality. But, needless to say, it doesn’t take dropping acid to learn that life ends. The silver skein will indeed one day be unwound. The reaper’s season will arrive. Just pray the journey there is as focused, intricate, and honest as the one set forth by Stone Breath.” - Britt Brown reviewing “The Silver Skein Unwound” in Dusted Magazine

tim renner knows wyrdfolk. he should, he coined the term. with the current flock of "neofolk" artists gathering a surprising amount of press 'round their nests, stone breath are somehow absent. perhaps they're outdated. can folk music be dated? is a clock? what about a cirle? wyrdfolk, or folk for those who have tired of the term, is unique in that it is rooted in the base images that compose the human spirit. it sounds like a walk through mythago wood, or jung's collective unconscious. so in a sense, the last note
is the same as the first note. no, there is no such thing as new in folk, there is only expression. we begin with the pot, all we can do is stir it. the ingredients are god given, and called by their old names. so why then, after numerous trips, requests, and inquiries was it so difficult to obtain a copy of 'the silver skein unwound' at the hippest record stores in new york city? i mean espers is displayed, so is joanna, and devendra is everywhere. is mr. renner and company hiding in the record clerk's beard? perhaps they're in his coworkers belly, gestating, waiting for the right moment to be name dropped. no, it's more likely, stone breath are in the woods, outside the city, far beyond the high rises and subways with their ears to the ground listening to what came before industry. peeling the layers back and joining in. without a care for the band of the moment, the sound of the day, the next big thing. they play for the trees and what lays beyond the branches. stone breath are a religious band. a chorus, a group of friends, a fellowship; earth, air, fire, and water. an otherworldly experience, they are the eye in the 'clash of the titans', they are the witches from macbeth, they are wyrdfolk. and i'll tell you a secret, they're a really cool band. and you know what else? 'the silver skein unwound' is probably the best album you haven't heard of in your social circles, and if by chance you have, you haven't given it a chance because you're just now being whispered to, you're just now being told, with tongue in ear, you're being told for a second time, that stonebreath is a very cool band. why? if tim's distinctive voice, his well carved guitar, the banjo clock, tick tock, tick tock, prydwyn's rainy voice, his snake oil salesman flute, sarada's yin, her hopeful voice, and ra campbell's memory don't provide an answer; you can always say: "the guy who started bruton town told me so." - Stone Breath in a Hipster’s Ear, by Bryan Cederberg, Bruton Town online.