Physical Edition: Brian Harnetty: Rawhead & Bloodybones
Format: CD + Booklet
A haunting and playful journey through Appalachian folk tales, Rawhead & Bloodybones deftly weaves together archival recordings of children’s voices from the 1940s with newly composed instrumental music.
The album centers on stories from the Leonard Roberts Collection at Berea College’s Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky — tales that are humorous, gruesome, and full of meaning and character. By combining these youthful voices and often-grisly tales with modern instrumental parts, Brian Harnetty creates a striking sound collage that is both beautiful and unsettling.
What’s Included:
- 1 CD with 16 tracks (8 original + 8 instrumental versions)
- Stories from the Leonard Roberts Collection (1940s, Kentucky)
- Illustrated booklet with photographs, essays, and archival background
About the Artist:
Brian Harnetty is a composer and artist whose work transforms archival recordings — from folk tales to historic transcriptions — into new, re-contextualized sound collages. His projects often focus on the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives (Kentucky) and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive (Chicago), blending past and present into immersive listening experiences.
Praise for Brian Harnetty:
- “Brilliant, maddening, addictive… Harnetty has proved that one way to preserve history is to weave it into the moment and let it vanish in our midst while echoing forever its truths, aphorisms, superstitions, and lies.” — AllMusic
- “Harnetty and band weave melancholy threads of music-box celesta, piano, flute, cello, and clarinet through warped reels of [Sun] Ra philosophy and instruction. The end result is peculiarly intimate and beautiful, a drifting dialogue between past and present.” — MOJO Magazine
- “Working like a novelist, [Harnetty] has immersed himself in an archive of field recordings – slices of past lives – and now emerges to create a new text, breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualising them.” — The Wire
- “The result is an other-worldly album that demands—and deserves—undivided attention in a darkened room with some good headphones.” — Paste Magazine
