Pitchfork

Those already steeped in Badgerlore lore will recognize the setting: off in the distant consciousness, naturalist in ethos, quiet and precise in sound. Fuck a myth though (if you must, "the music is organized around the conceptual theme of birds constructing nests"), and a wood cult too, cause the coercion just cheapens it. What's there is enough-- tired three-chord progressions, ineffable human noises, long silences, and longer delays: Stories for Owls finds its real charm in the absence of dictation.

The pieces fall out, nametags pre-applied, with Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and Deerhoof refugee Rob Fisk at work together as Badgerlore from as far back as 1998, here with two new players, Tom Carter (Charalambides) and Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans). Sound expansion's the upside, extra blood yielding an easy interplay between warbling organs and guitars, wordless vocals, and gentle tape manipulations. Organic sure, but the Stories for Owls touchstones are, in their intellectualism and breadth, surprisingly more art than folk, recalling Eno's Ambient series, Laurie Anderson's warmer vocal narcissism, and even John Cale's early, occasional organ visitations.

At their most bare, as on "Stone Stick Earth Brick", Badgerlore stitch full-grown songs out of one or two aural ideas. The jump-off's a lackadaisical three strums, the gaps between iterations filled in by sympathetic note clusters and, later, by falsetto harmonies. The vocals, gradually manipulated, circle up and up, filling space formerly uninhabited and stark. Less structured and more purely ambient is "String Wrist", anchored by organ that fades off away from the speakers, the echo buoyed by two guitars and epic delays. Even the silences go long, interrupted only by fragile bursts of keys, pulling together, with only a few sounds, an almost subconscious logic. "III" follows the same meandering path: broken teeth piano, shimmering and bent guitar, banging away with what's at hand.

But all good intentions to one side; the medium, round here, is the message. Meaning inclusive, back-to-nature forest music must include, or it's cruel before it's kind. So credit the appeal, on top of a very generous sound, to a rare transparency. In the record's silences, you can actually hear hands on strings, and then the pluck, pull and plectrum that give rise again to their unadorned sound. The harmonica of "Your Discomfort, My Happiness" is not so much played as breathed in and out of; the only song to feature remotely traditional playing (a sort of bare-bones raga gesture), the players are all nearly as audible as their instruments. This melding goes literal in the all vocal, all four players farewell "Building a Nest", which bypasses the instruments entirely in favor of the instrumentalists. Otherworldly is not the word, though it's tempting; fact is, it's easy to see where Stories for Owls comes from.