Brian Harnetty: Rawhead & Bloodybones

A haunting and playful journey through Appalachian folk tales, where children’s voices from the 1940s meet newly composed music in an unforgettable sound collage.

Rawhead & Bloodybones deftly spins together sampled Appalachian folk tales and field recordings with newly composed music. The album focuses on stories mostly told by children and recorded in the 1940s — humorous, gruesome, and full of meaning and character. Woven together with archival samples and newly composed instrumental parts, the combination of youthful voices and often-grisly tales creates a striking contrast, both beautiful and unsettling.

What’s Included

• 16 audio tracks (8 original and 8 instrumental versions)
• View the complete tracklist here: [Insert hosted PDF link]
• Features stories from the Leonard Roberts Collection at the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives (Kentucky)
• Digital booklet (PDF) with photographs, essays, and archival background on the stories and recordings

Artist Bio

A composer and artist, Brian Harnetty’s music discovers old stories in sound archives, and creates new stories to complement them. His work transforms sampled archival material—including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings—into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For the past decade, this has led to a focus on projects with the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive in Chicago.

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

“Harnetty has approached this stuff with the same surety that marked his earlier work… looking only for sounds and words that he knew would work. And they do.”

— The Wire