With a foundational palette comprised of “breathing" instruments (Swedish bagpipes, pump organ, elder and bamboo flutes, Mellotron saxophone and flute tapes), beneath chanted, animistic verse, “Kin” endeavors to exhale enchantment back into the living world.

Composed while hiking hundreds of miles through the remote Big Sur backcountry, “Kin’s” ritual text (lyrics) evokes and invokes Fletcher Tucker’s inner and outer journeys across uncanny trails of kinship with place. Tucker cultivates communion with mycelium and decaying stumps, blizzards and waterfalls, his own infant and ancestral spirits – and offers each one voice and tone, a chance for Mystery to speak for itself. Within “Kin’s” incantations you will find: a mythopoetic retelling of Tucker’s daughter’s birth as high ceremony; recollections of moments of radical clarity and aliveness in the wild; feral Zen philosophy; and an ornate description of Tucker’s own syncretic altar.

The ancient, psychospiritual technology of chanting is favored over singing throughout the album, while close, uncanny harmonies serve to widen gateways into liminal realms. Voices float atop clear, deep pools of acoustic drones. The surface of this water shimmers and ripples with rhythmic and melodic disturbances: sonic offerings of bells, bowls, gongs, chimes, analog synthesizers, 12-string electric guitars, pedal steel, bass, humla (bowed Swedish mountain zither), all manner of drums, clacking oak branches, and rattling leaves.

Potent collaborations with a few esteemed friends – Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Mariam Wallentin (Fire! Orchestra, Mariam the Believer), Chuck Johnson, Sean Smith (LFZ), and Spencer Owen – enrich “Kin’s” domain of animacy and enchantment.

PRESS

“[With] hypnotic, multi-tracked spoken-word poetry delivered over a droning swell of ‘breathing’ instruments…. Big Sur artist Fletcher Tucker’s musical practice endeavors to connect with the land, the people, and the invisible ancestors around him” – The Fader

“For fans of the sum total of the energy of all living things.” – Outside Noise

“Kin takes cues from ambient, outsider folk, and new age, but as one coherent piece of music, it sounds like absolutely nothing else.” – Pop Matters (8/10)

“Our owls here enjoy Fletcher’s poetry” – Aaron Weaver of Wolves in the Throne Room

“This one feels like it’s come crawling out of a cave older than memory… ancient, psychedelic folk at its most spellbinding”  – Where the Music Meets

“Kin genuinely sounds like nothing else, an album full of ritualistic sonic patterns and precisely detailed shifts in tone and mood, an album rooted less in a single landscape than in the very idea of landscape, and all the ancientness and weirdness that implies.” – Klof Mag

“feral dirges and tangy earth mantras that reflect a more haunted and desperate sense of wilderness love” – Erik Davis

“Cooked up in the depths of the Big Sur wilderness, Kin feels like it was born from the earth itself. Droning nature meditations from a Californian mystic.” – Uncut Magazine (8/10)

“In an age when our default cultural settings place us ‘outside’ or ‘apart’ from nature, Tucker’s music reminds us that we are instead of a piece with it—natural expressions of its continual process, just like the tall trees, writhing dirt dwellers, and mountains themselves. This isn’t a record for passive listening, but one made for contemplation, meditation, and connection, songs made to extoll the kinship that permeates our existence...” – Aquarium Drunkard

Named one of All Songs Considered’s (NPR) “Best New Albums”

Sample TrackS

TRACKLIST

1. A Candle

2. Great Flowering Mind

3. Pregnant Emptiness

4. Only Dancing

5. To Light a Fire

6. Born Back into the Earth

7. The Breathing Night