Scott Tuma - No Greener Grass (2017)

'Chicago folk ascetic Scott Tuma’s ‘No Greener Grass’ is a deep-rooted and photographic song cycle unfolding like a palimpsest of American roots music creating an aural moiré effect as the distorted echoes of the past are put to use in documenting the ever-fleeting present.
The music here moves to idiosyncratic rhythms of daily life - the dry rustling of autumn leaves and the chatter of sparrows in the gangway or the pattering dance of child’s play as heard from the floor overhead. Recorded with the windows open and the sounds of the seasons filling the room, Tuma gently wrings slight and barely recognizable figures into revenant waltzes and translucent veils of layered light, capturing a feeling that is both haunting and otherworldly but also keenly familiar - too emotionally fundamental to be translated into anything but aerial abstractions.
An epic and cumulative work, No Greener sees Tuma working with frequent collaborator Jason Ajemain through an extended series of brief pieces and familiar motifs informed by themes of recurring seasonal change and universal impermanence and intrigued by the romance, magic and pain of memory and nostalgia.'