3hattrio - Come Morning (2025)

Perhaps the supreme purveyors of “American desert music”, this Utah-based trio (comprised of Eli Wrankle, Hal Cannon and Greg Istock) was somewhat cast asunder in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, with Wrankle moving to Las Vegas while Cannon temporarily relocated to Oregon. After solo projects from Cannon and Istock the trio began to work on new music, sending sound files back and forth until an invitation to record at Zion Canyon Mesa, an artist retreat situated in Utah’s Zion National Park, birthed “Come Morning”, the trio’s eighth album. Perched high above the cusp of the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert they congregated each day to watch the sunrise, in an effort, as Cannon says, to “discover that actual sound, the crack of dawn.”

From their inception 3hattrio have celebrated both the spiritual and geological splendours of their particular homeland, the desert, the rocks, the light and sound and the history. Cannon was steeped in the local history while Istock was a dreadlocked sound experimentalist. With Wrankle’s classical violin added to the mix the trio’s music has been keenly appreciated with most reviewers applauding their sense of atmosphere, the Zen like calmness, the visionary spirit which has informed them throughout their albums and live appearances.

‘Come Morning’ is the first of their albums to be all instrumental. Awed by what Cannon calls “the massive visual drama” they witnessed daily, he goes on to say that, despite their long familiarity with the scene they “still find it too mysterious to talk about.” It’s a superb collection of instrumentals which evoke for the listener dreams, memories and visions of the wide open western spaces of the USA, even if for most of us these are all parsed from TV and the movies – indeed, it could be considered a soundtrack in search of a movie. But, having said that, the trio invest much more into the music than simple campfire pickings, a prime example being on ‘Yawn Stretch Day’, a tune which opens with a simple banjo motif which is repeated until Istock rumbles into view with a short and quite unique bass line. Likewise ‘Sunnyside Up’ kicks off with a banjo but soon succumbs to a mild infestation of percussive effects before Wrankle’s violin weeps in. Istock is the behind-the-scenes master of ceremony for much of the time, his double bass rumbling and bowing while he creates all manner of sounds from his instrument, coming to the fore on the bustling ‘Red Sky Warning’ and on the almost jazz-like abstraction of ‘Raven’s Wing’. At times one wonders how the trio create such wonderful sounds from their basic line up of banjo, bass and violin. ‘Low Mist’ has Wrankle’s violin howling from an abyss while ‘Endless Sunrise’ could easily sit alongside the psychedelia which featured in Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.

At the centre of this wonderment is Cannon, his banjo grounding the trio as he surveys the landscape. He has simultaneously released a solo album ‘Cowboy Sutra’ which marries cowboy songs with the drone of eastern styled harmoniums, a fine companion piece to ‘Come Morning’. Did he and his fellow musicians get to hear that “crack of dawn” mentioned earlier? We’ll give the last words to him as he writes, “But then I learned the idiom dates back to the 19th century and is not a sound at all. It’s that exact moment when the night splits open a crack in the horizon and night yields to daylight. I still like the idea it could be a musical moment.”