Culture
The Peel melds traditional Appalachian instrumentation with sonic exploration on ‘In the Ferns’
By: Emily Votaw
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – In the Ferns, the third release from Athens-based instrumental trio The Peel, draws on the raw textures of Appalachian instrumentation while channelling the frisky spirit of sonic exploration, resulting in a tactile, often cinematic experience.
Across nine tracks, Lucy Schwallie (fiddle), Adam Fuller (banjo), and David Colagiovanni (guitar), with producer Brian Koscho, craft something hand-hewn and immediate, capturing, with remarkable clarity, the rainy December day they recorded it.
Crucially, the album hums with a sense of play. There’s an unforced yet intensely focused energy behind it—a creative appetite that favors intuition, driven by a desire to hear differently and make the familiar feel new.
Banjo, fiddle, and guitar blend in cadenced, euphonic layers that occasionally dip into moments of arrhythmia—never aimless, just attuned to whatever the song asks for next. The album’s strength lies in this kind of dynamic restraint: its ability to move seamlessly from soft sighs to spirited murmurs, from rhythmic play to melodic aches, always in tune with something larger than itself.
In the Ferns grows up from between the boundaries of “old time” and “experimental” music, reminding us that old-time music is, at its roots, experimental: music made by people doing what they can with what they have to express what words can’t.
Hemlock opens In the Ferns – a throaty violin weeps and sways before banjo and guitar join in a rhythm that feels more like breath than beat. Strings bray and sigh in layered call-and-response, building tone the way a painter layers pigment.
The Peel thrives on this kind of instrumental exchange. Adam Disturbed a Bird pairs a whimsical title with tight, melodic interplay, as fiddle, banjo, and guitar pass phrases with near-telepathic ease. It feels less composed than conversed.
The title track, In the Ferns, deepens that sense of intimacy. What sounds like pedal steel and a musical saw (but what is actually a sustainer and slide on a banjo) emerge from the mix, blending with low guitar pulses and to create something strange and spectral—yet undeniably warm.
Woods continues the album’s exploration of mood and motion. Instruments converse in loose, breathing phrases—groaning, gasping, sighing. Rhythmic slips and tonal dissonance heighten the sense of spontaneity. Like much of the record, Woods works in layers: it can settle into the background or draw you into its shifting, inner world.
The album closes with Na Coilite, an Irish phrase meaning “of the woods,” a brief field recording of running water. It’s a simple, tender gesture that mirrors the spirit of the project as a whole, an invitation to listen more closely—not just to music, but to the world itself.