Josh Varnedore - the thunder might save us (2024) [Hi-Res]

Delving into cavernous darkness and emerging with glimmering light, Josh Varnedore’s ambient soundscapes reverberate with an ancient, earthen warmth. Reverent and immersed in the natural world, the Ohio-based multimedia artist finds inspiration and more in the hills of Ohio and Arkansas, where he prospects for crystals and natural objects of wood, and bone to incorporate into his music and art. As he works with these elemental and organic materials–Varnedore bows his guitar using a rosined stone core sample from the Union Carbide mine in Arkansas that he estimates to be over one hundred million years old–Varnedore extracts the sounds of rock, soil and once-living matter, giving voice to the story of our slow burning journey with the earth.

Central to Varnedore’s art is the relationship between enduring objects and ephemeral life, a subject he explores through improvised works of fingerpicked and bowed guitar, field recordings, and a diverse array of sounds created with a vintage sampler. In a collaborative creation with nature, Arkansan quartz will serve as a guitar slide, and a deer jaw found in the woods near his home is another earthen bow that he uses to produce the music he molds like clay. A palpable sense of place imbues Varnedore’s music, which he records in an old schoolhouse, as his songs are touched by the history of rural Ohio and the lives of those who have passed through the 19th century schoolhouse’s doors.

As he traverses varied sonic terrain, Varnedore taps into voids to establish an immense gravity while threading delicate, weightless patterns from the natural world into shifting webs of harmonized melodies. The resulting songs are both glacial and luminous, golden-hued hums of an unspoken language that pulse and echo and decay and renew. His forthcoming debut project for the renowned Nashville-based ambient record label Hammock Music will be released starting in April of 2024. -Wyatt Marshall