Fletcher Tucker - Kin (2025)

With a foundational palette comprised of “breathing" instruments (Swedish bagpipes, pump organ, elder and bamboo flutes, Mellotron saxophone and flute tapes), beneath chanted, animistic verse, Kin endeavors to exhale enchantment back into the living world.

Composed while hiking hundreds of miles through the remote Big Sur backcountry, Kin’s ritual text (lyrics) evokes and invokes Fletcher Tucker’s inner and outer journeys across uncanny trails of kinship with place. Tucker cultivates communion with mycelium and decaying stumps, blizzards and waterfalls, ancestral spirits and his own infant – and offers each one voice and tone, a chance for Mystery to speak for itself. Within Kin’s incantations you will find: a mythopoetic retelling of Tucker’s daughter’s birth as high ceremony; recollections of moments of radical clarity and aliveness in the wild; feral Zen philosophy; and an ornate description of Tucker’s own syncretic altar.

On this L.P. (Fletcher Tucker’s 3rd under his given name), the ancient, psychospiritual technology of chanting is favored over singing throughout the album, while close, uncanny harmonies serve to widen gateways into liminal realms. Voices float atop clear, deep pools of acoustic drones. The surface of this water shimmers and ripples with rhythmic and melodic disturbances: sonic offerings of bells, bowls, gongs, chimes, analog synthesizers, 12-string electric guitars, pedal steel, bass, hummel (bowed Swedish mountain zither), all manner of drums, clacking oak branches, and rattling leaves.

Potent collaborations with a few esteemed friends – Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie, The Microphones), Mariam Wallentin (Fire! Orchestra, Mariam the Believer), Chuck Johnson, Sean Smith (LFZ), and Spencer Owen – enrich “Kin’s” domain of animacy and enchantment.