Written by: Dave Cantrell

Labels are funny, slippery things. Everyone uses them as necessary shorthand while silently – or not so silently – despising their necessity. Though more burbling than raging, the debate continues and for good reason. This is music we’re talking about, illimitibly vast and profligate, often cross-breeding at a rate dizzying enough to create acute vertigo and yet we – all of us, journalists and fans alike – persist in our attempts to hang a specific genre identity on its many – some would say infinite – variations. In effect it’s as futile as clothes-pinning names on the backs of a particularly restless mob of runners as they mill about the ever-shifting starting line of some immense, chaotic race, one in which the participants are guaranteed to scatter in all directions once the gun goes off and either hightail it down a wildly unexpected avenue and/or partner up after a few blocks with runners from other teams in unlikely pairings that result in them tearing off their jerseys anyway.

I bring this up, twisted analogy and all, because I’m listening to the wonderfully accomplished new album from Rio en Medio – called Rio en Medio Radio and out Nov.20th on Women’s Work Records – the nom-de-strum of Danielle Stech-Homsy, an artist of many talents, not least an easy mastery of any fret-boarded instrument placed in her hands and an ability to sing like a nightingale in an angels choir, and the dilemma of the ‘label’ inevitably comes to mind. One can imagine the album falling under various related headings during its critical lifespan, some opting for ‘avant folk,’ others ‘freak’ or ‘fried’ folk, some, one reckons, claiming it as a new inhabitant of New Weird America®. But really, the end-of-the-day fact is it’s simply folk music, the same way those Incredible String Band records of the late 60’s were folk music, which is to say subtly, almost sneakingly transcendent and filled throughout with a quiet abundance.

Singing primarily in English but also dipping where appropriate into Italian, French, and Welsh, enlisting the mindful assistance of a small handful of empathic musicians – Dave Roe, one of Johnny Cash’s Tennessee Three, lays down most of the bass, Brightblack Morning Bright’s Nathan Shineywater helps produce and contributes a spot of bass here, a lead there plus some percussion, Pentangle alumnus Terry Cox drums, and, on the gentle heartbreaker take on “Darlin’ Corey,” George Flynn, past ninety, veteran of two wars and once Hank Williams’ driver who Danielle found playing outside a mom-n-pop for change, adds harmonica that takes the track from thoughtful cover to a textured gem richer than the Appalachian soil from which it comes – Stech-Homsy, at the helm, delivers nothing less than a one-woman songbook-slash-textbook on atmospheric, intimate finger-picked folk music that stretches even the implied sanctity of that description. In the way it achieves a level of sighing Lomaxian honesty inside the context of a 21st C. studio advantage, the record is a revelation.

Echoes quiver in the core of these songs that sound from the Carter Family to the devotions of Gillian Welch, absorbing, via some kind of intuited osmosis, the vast field of voices fluttering with timeless authenticity in between. Such is the focused reverence of form – without, it should be said, the slightest lean towards a pressed formality – that there’s an inescapable sense of a holy ground being consecrated. Step anywhere into this river – the lucent and hopeful opener “Farther” that twins itself in a coiled embrace of nature and her seasons, the Saint-Expury-drawn “The Fox & the Little Prince” that makes of its tender airs something deeply heartfelt and playful, the simple, elegant wisdom of “Sera Pasai (Evening Song)” where it’s naught but classical guitar and the close-in cloistered dream of the singer’s voice that conveys as a lullaby from another world – and a warming swirl of artistry envelops.

“Y Deryn Du (The Blackbird),” reticent yet in full bloom, floats aloft with the same degree of determined fragility – again it’s Stech-Homsy alone with her classical guitar – that causes us to marvel at the quiet spectacle of a bird in flight, its path sinking and lifting on wing; “Thread Song,” with its koan-like lyrics, the nestled sparkle of its electric piano, a bass synth thrumming like the hum of afternoon, and Cox’s ineffable drum work, could snug in comfortably between The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and Vashti Bunyan’s sparse aesthetic; glowing album centerpiece “Terrapin Karma,” the singer alone on existence’s stage armed with only her treasured baritone uke, an acoustic, and that mystery-clarifying voice of hers layered like warm morning dew on soft winter snow, speaks out from the very nucleus of things with the gentle persistence of life’s invincibility itself, borrowing for deft effect a breathtaking stanza from medieval poet Guillem IX as well, in seamless sleight-of-voice, a passage from Walden. Both ephemeral and deeply grounded, it has the feeling of quintessence, as if this is a crucial slice of the artist’s heart extracted and made musical for all to hear.

Seeming to be simultaneously above the fray of the human condition and tangled inextricably within it, Radio dwells in a space where love and nature – inseparable at their core – reign despite the odds and hope lives no matter how often dashed. True, it trembles some and beautifully, but out of its many delicately adroit balancing acts the spirit not only survives but thrives inside a sometimes inimical world by embracing it, engaging it, becoming it to the point it reciprocates as if by some universal reflex. Rich in musicianship as it is, and flooded with devotion to songcraft, this is, in the end, a record of that intangible symbiosis come to life. It’s also, plain said, beautiful.