Recording: Rebecca Bruton

Artist: Rebecca Bruton

Song: Tam Lin [excerpt] [composer: Martin Arnold]

Recorded at Wenona Lodge (Track Could Bend #97), November 5, 2025.

Rebecca Bruton - Tam Lin [excerpt]

Rebecca Bruton's recent visits hereabouts have revolved around her Swanherds project, but this mini-tour with Darren Williams instead saw her tackling a "transparent tracing" of Martin Arnold's retelling of the old Scottish ballad "Tam Lin". Martin's reworking of the piece was crafted for The Reveries and the Array Ensemble, so it exudes a wobbly maximalism, making Bruton's version an interesting flip into unadorned minimalism. Although given that it runs over forty minutes, there's a sense of spacial expansion at play here as well — time to really lean back and dig into the sounds in a setting where the context of listening to something this spare for so long actually creates the conditions to slow the mind down enough to hear what's creeping in between the notes.

Besides brushing up against that endlessly ambling "Boring Formless Nonsense" that much of Arnold's work is associated with, Bruton's refolkification also brought to mind Picastro's sleepy drift as well as Wyrd Visions' stretched-out-like-toffee balladry. The similarly-spare retelling of her own "Nora, Listening" that started the set shows that there's space for these techniques to echo more broadly within her work.

You can check out some more from this set over on youtube:

[Track Could Bend is back at Wenona tonight (Tuesday, December 3rd), with sets from Dept. of Loss (Fan Wu/Phil Hamilton) and Pigeon Dance (Victor/Lenny/Clay).]