Hazy and out of focus, not as in a dream, but as in awakening from short, uneasy sleep. Uneasy because it never became a full separation from the world, instead letting all of its invisible threads pass through, the mind yet another cat’s cradle – a spider’s web, leaf veins spreading fractally, voices intersecting, branching thunder, constellations in the night sky changing over millions of years. Here In The Valley, with its blurred cover art, its Grouper-like soft and processed vocals, and its echoing folk instrumentation, nurtures that disorientation, experienced as a light porosity; its murmurs become you, its murmurs become the world.
Helllhound is the duo of renowned harpist Nailah Hunter and her partner, multi-instrumentalist Cadmar Fitzhugh, and it is named after their husky, called Sigge, which means “victory”. You’d expect abrasion with that name, but it is worth remembering that Sigge is also derived from the Norse word for “guardian”. The truth is that the supernatural dog, across cultures, is usually a guardian figure, the living confirmation of a threshold about to be crossed, warning wanderers of the restructuring of their past, present, and future. The album itself is a personal exploration of a wide – wild, perhaps – moment of transition for the artists: moving from city to country, becoming parents, an entire resignification of “home”. At the fog-covered gates of our own histories we often find memory seeping into projection, wayward timelines fractally extending, connecting our images of self with the tales of others, and every time we decide to trick, convince, or even rally the guardian to our cause, the limit blurs. Here In The Valley’s production tends towards lo-fi soundstaging, producing an alluring effect in which we seem to be floating amidst the sounds (think Grouper, again). Instruments with privileged clarity, like the piano, seem to dissolve away, the grave, deep bellow of strings unclear turning into drones that absorb and transform their surroundings. The vocals are not meant to be rationally processed, they are meant to be followed in the same way we would follow an image in our heads and hold it to be the truth of a moment which we are unsure is in the past or in the future, but that we nonetheless live.
This experience is anything but isolating or individualizing, because it cannot emerge from the singularity of a voice, a guitar, a piano, or a harp. Whatever the certainties they produce, helllhound draws them into the field of constellations, focal points blurred through connections that make sense only if you remain still, right there, wherever you are, and project that storied memory unto every line drawn eternities ago upon the sky. The light of the past rains upon you, sweet folk melodies that recall the tradition that starts everywhere and nowhere, jazzy harmonies in full sway, but when you hear it, it speaks the tongue of tomorrow. Through you it expects, through you it finds a path, and all alongside it you will find everyone else who is also now listening; as you cross one gate after another, echoes abound.
If there’s anything negative to say about Here In The Valley, it’s that it ends too quickly. Even then, it is a powerful first statement, and I am hopeful that the helllhound will keep watch. I’d like to meet it again, because it holds the promise of a psych-folk renewed, a threshold well worth crossing. (David Murrieta Flores)
a closer listen 