Springs by Ben Livingston

Regeneration is the theme here. The albums begins with a field recording of flute played in the burn zone off the Woodward Valley trail a year after the fire, surrounded by the verdant regrowth of fire-coppiced elderberry. The flutes I am playing on this album are handmade from elderberry wood, and form the core of the music, along with another new-to-me instrument: the upright bass. Nylon string guitar, harp, percussion, and light touches of electronics and field recordings fill out the rest of the sound. These ethereal, lushly-organic pieces speak to the regenerative effect of fire, the transformative hope emerging from a cleansing destruction, and the life-giving cycles of water, spurring regrowth. This album will come out later in the year, but you can listen to two tracks now.

Ben Livingston makes landscape conversant bio-regional instrumental music in Coast Miwok territory. He is also a vegetable farmer and an editor/publisher of the Inverness Almanac and Mount Vision Press

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