House and Land announce new album Across The Field, out June 14th

“A haunting sound, showing just how much these musicians can communicate with such sparse arrangements… House and Land don’t just make these songs their own: they effectively reclaim them, illustrating that they’ve always been theirs.” – Pitchfork

“[Sarah Louise’s] voice is a sweet and tender contrast to Morgan’s droning fiddle and her own rapturous 12-string leaps like a flame in a storm.”
– NPR Music

“Henson and Morgan manage to make these timeworn tunes and tales sound absolutely fresh and alive, lifting the veil on the centuries and uncovering an often-devastating emotional core.” – Aquarium Drunkard

On June 14th, 2019, duo House and Land will release Across The Field. On their sophomore album, acclaimed guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Sarah Louise and fiddler/banjoist Sally Anne Morgan (Black Twig Pickers) cull songs from Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the U.K. and imbue them with a sense of themselves through careful arrangements, varied instrumentation, and lyrical reframing. Their feminist interpretations of lyrics reflective of another time and attitude is both empowering and illustrative.

A keen understanding of the traditional source material House and Land pulls from allows the duo the freedom to experiment. Instead of seeing old, even ancient material as limiting, they use the living songs as compositional canvases to paint rich new tapestries and tell modern versions of timeless stories. On single “Two Sisters,” Louise spins polyrhythmic figures of electric guitar around Morgan’s clawhammer banjo, imitating the oscillations of a modular synthesizer.

During the duo’s travels since the release of debut House and Land in 2016 they have met and played with the likes of British folk heroes Shirley Collins, Carole Pegg, and French hurdy gurdy master Emmanuelle Parrenin. These brief encounters served to reinvigorate the duo and reinforced the importance of using songs to connect people to the land and to the continuity of human culture. On Across The Field, House and Land have taken up the mantel of their elders with reverence and care, weaving fresh, resplendent, contemporary tales from disparate threads of the past.