blue fifty-seven: Henry Birdsey

“I wasn't really aware of the whole ‘ambient americana’ genre,” says Henry Birdsey of the genre he probably created and certainly perfected. “Hard as that may be to believe. I never thought of myself or anyone I play with in either of those terms, but then musicians don't get to draw those kinds of lines anyway...”

Henry is talking about Old Saw, the much-beloved and intensely critically-acclaimed lap steel drone project he started with some friends, as an excuse to play with a recently-acquired reel-to-reel tape recorder and some instruments that had been gathering dust. Last year, he released the final album as Old Saw.

“The Old Saw stuff took on a curious life of its own probably because it's a bit sweeter and more structural than a lot of the stuff I do solo. We did as much as we could in that territory and I'm happy to have seen the project come to life and then decay just as easily.”

Henry’s post-Saw work for Blue Tapes sees that old lap steel magic return, but in more longform and meditative form. The tape’s first side is for a quartet of the instruments, seemingly released from the burden of playing notes and left, in their graceful retirement, to simply sing the way THEY want to sing.

“I like that it's indestructible,” Henry says of his instrument of choice. “The lap steel is more of a channel for working with metal sound sources. I use lots of pieces of brass, carriage bolts, steel tines, and sheet metal. Both sides of this tape aren't the actual lap steel itself played directly, but rather the strings transducing, filtering and tuning sound from other objects.”

In his day job he works as a welder and metal fabricator.

“I like working on pieces that do very little for a long time. I'm not interested at all in movement and development,” he continues. "One side of a tape is barely enough time to even let one idea play itself out.”

On the second side, two lap steels entwine in a deep, droning duet – a double-helix of amplified metal unfurling into the sky forever. The music of blue fifty-seven is raw, unpretty but not unbeautiful – soulful, communicative.

“When it works, I want the music to be a transference away from the realm of any human language and thought,” Henry concludes. “No concepts, no symbolism.”

“I want to make the sound of a sheet of limestone bedrock in midwinter. In the best moments, I forget the music is mine, that I'm making it. I don't know that it is music at all. Sometimes people at shows ask what it feels like or what I'm thinking about when playing and I have to give the awkward answer that it feels like what I imagine death might be. Something is occurring around me but I have no language beyond raw involuntary perception, a state of total non-knowing.”

PRAISE FOR HENRY BIRDSEY

“Old Saw still dedicate most of their energy to the margins, creating something deeply evocative while leaving it to the listener’s imagination to define what it’s evocative of.” – The Quietus

“Birdsey knows how to manipulate slow-changing timbres, such that each piece seems to have a different color, despite them all traveling on the same sonic track.” – Bandcamp Daily

“Old Saw conjures the ghosts of Americana, wrapping guitar-picking, banjo plucks, pedal steel whine and violin cries in ambient drone. The music hovers, envelops, levitates rather than moving forward. It’s drenched in overtone, which lends a mystic, other-vibrations aura. These are old time instruments bent towards alternate universes.” - Dusted

“Old Saw manage to cast and sustain a mesmerizing and immersive spell of soulful, subtly hallucinatory tranquility for nearly forty minutes. This is a quiet and modest masterpiece, the kind of album that I wish I could live inside.” - Brainwashed

“Old Saw’s music is devotional in the sense that it holds up hard truths as beacons and reminds us to look them straight in the eye so we can move on. Aural washes sing like an acoustic choir, bringing us in from the cold and giving permission to send our mistakes back to the grave, back to the open sky. It doesn’t matter where we lay our heads and it doesn’t matter how far we’ve strayed from cosmos’ astral blessings, nobody is ever totally lost.” – Foxy Digitalis