Sixteen(!) years after Vol. III - A Hand Full of Days, B’ee returns with the long-awaited next chapter - Vol. IV: Casting Lines - A Museum of Memory.
We all know B’erth as one of the most remarkable and unique songwriters of our time. His psychedelic symbolist folk music has shone through his projects In Gowan Ring and Birch Book since the early ’90s. A new album from him is always a rare and important event.
B’ee says in his own words:
"In Defense of Nostalgic Recollection
After nearly a decade in gestation, I’m so very relieved to present Volume IV in the Birch Book series of albums: Casting Lines. As alluded to in the subtitle - A Museum of Memory - many of the songs explore the contents, mode and study of personal retrospection: an apparently endless trove of fascinations indulged upon toward a range of signification.
The surreal displaced aesthetic sense experienced when inhabiting a focused memory world - set in stark contrast to the here and now - I find to be among the preeminent peculiar pleasures offered by a capacity for self-reflection. That these discursions may bestow pragmatic epiphanies relevant to worldly navigation, or a salutary temperance upon terrestrial actualities, are but ancillary blessings.
Are we but phantom ships on phantom oceans? May we there settle tragedies never reconciled - reconcile sorrows never settled? To fully engage with this mystery of memory is to probe reality itself: an ontological quest beyond narcissistic self-absorption, toward-paradoxically-a more visceral experience of present circumstance.
Casting Lines has been lovingly adorned with a collection of enlarged perspectives from the illustration A Museum of Memory by Maria Gordon, which was specially designed with themes from the songs herein. As with previous editions of Birch Book, Volume IV accommodates many compositions tending towards the mildly autobiographical."
