« Jackie McDowell connects the sounds of various folk traditions — vocal rounds, acoustic guitar, harmonium, dulcimer and the drone-producing shruti boxes of Indian music — with the meditative care of a private ceremony and the blurriness of hallucination. Based in Pittsburgh, she has put out a few dozen recordings since 2009, often on cassette or limited-quantity disc, sometimes under the name Inez Lightfoot. “New Blood Medicine” is her latest, released online earlier this year and just now available as a CD-R from the French label Wild Silence. It’s a record that leads with atmospheric detail: echo effects, deliberate placement of sounds around microphones (a shaker up close, a whistled melody far away) and incidental or accidental buzzes, hums, distortions and radio transmissions. But it also has songs with lingering intent, including “Thirteen Mothers Rise” and “Scrape Dirt Marrow.” »
(Ben Ratliff, The New York Times)
——————————————————————————-
credits
released February 27, 2016
Instruments on this album include harmonium, mountain dulcimer, long-neck banjo, guitar, organ, shruti, percussion, tape loops, electronics and voice.
Recorded by JM. Sequenced by Matt McDowell. Mastered by Caleb Mulkerin.
All songs by JM except two: “Tea Song,” written by Michael Hurley, and “Stars In The Heaven,” an old North American folk ballad.
Artwork by Stanley Clough (1966) with gracious permission of Peter Pauper Press.