Logan Farmer - Still No Mother (2020) [Hi-Res]

On Still No Mother, the Colorado-based songwriter processes and explores climate change anxiety using the framework of the American folk song. The album grew from an initial concept of imagining the songs farmhands will sing when their acreage has dried up or burned, and rising sea levels begin engulfing the coasts—not unlike those sung by Woody Guthrie during the devastation of the Dust Bowl. While much art on this subject focuses on external imagery like glacial melt or wildfires, Farmer instead points his writing inward to examine the human mind’s relationship to this impending reality, and the psychological burdens therein. The resulting ambient-folk suite places his earnest croon within a mosaic of orchestral strings, distant piano, and well-placed flutters of electronics, which emerge like artifacts in the rubble of the dusty future his lyrics depict. “The music is intentionally gentle and delicate with shards of piercing dissonance scattered throughout,” explains Farmer. “The intention was to capture the quiet moments of contemplation before the storm comes, as we peek through the cracks in the wall to catch a glimpse of the approaching danger, now a growing dot on the horizon.”

Written and recorded at home, the album weaves a shortlist of storytelling influences and devices into a poignant set of dichotomies: organic and inorganic; celestial and earthen; delicate and dissonant. Though Farmer’s impressive array of textures and instruments and use of ambience and interstitial collage (including field recordings captured in Iceland) might suggest otherwise, Still No Mother is folk music at its heart. And if the task of folk musicians is to tell the tales of their day, Logan Farmer succeeds in documenting through song an inner life of a person watching the specter of climate change grow on the horizon.