3 out of 5

Label: VHF Records

Produced by: Bobby Lee (recorded, mixed, and live tracks remixed by)

This is actually a delightful listen, but it’s an instance where less is more.

Tom Winter, Tom Spring is an expanded rerelease of a 57 unit lathe cut on micro-label Sonido Polifonico that paired the expansive stylings of guitarist C Joynes with fiddler supreme Mike Gangloff for some retakes of Joynes tracks, a traditional, and some new work. And look: I wasn’t aware of this thing without VHF representing it in un-micro quantity, and less-expensive-than-lathe format, so there’re huge Thank Yous all around for the duo for producing this, and Bill Kellum for presenting it to an arguably larger audience. As things kick off – with the jaunty mouth harp / guitar of Rapid City, then Gangloff fiddling on Joynes’ fanciful West Cavaliers – you’ll note my adjectives there suggest something pretty sprightly, and yeah: we’re off to a great start. The duo play off of each other incredibly well, and we’re either weighted by classical guitar playing or emotive string playing to balance out to something that’s greater than the sum of its already great parts, and not just something I can easily call Black Twig Picker-adjacent or somesuch.

That Two Bishops turns into moodier territory, with Gangloff back on harp and the whole thing mired in delightful reverb, is not a complaint: this is an excellent counterpoint to the precedings.

Nope: it’s how VHF rearranged and expanded this to better justify the 12″, which I definitely appreciate from a cost perspective, but ultimately disrupts the flow of the recording.

On the original, the light-hearted duel-off Sail Away Ladies plays after ambient interstitial Eight Sets Of Inverted Commas, the latter of which is a good coda to Bishops, and the former is a wipe-the-slate-clean pick-me-up. This perfectly allows for the B-side to be the 14-minute Witch Marks, which is an amazingly dense, and emotive bit of improv of noise and instrumentation, apparently inspired by “occult markings” in the building in which the two were playing, which is a perfect accompanying image.

Okay, so: all of those songs are here, but after Two Bishops, we cut in with a live take of Gangloff solo (The Other Side of Catawba), then end the A-side with the traditional. The live song is a good one; the recording is rich. But it’s still a different vibe than the two playing together, and the swing back to the traditional doesn’t have the tip-toed lead-in of the interstitial, but is instead two longer, sadder tunes.

On the B-side, we start with a live take of a Joynes solo track (An Opening), which has the same pluses / minuses: good song; different vibe. Then the interstitial, which, again, doesn’t work as a good lead-in to what follows: Witch Marks.

All of this is super weird because I get the decisions, and appreciate that I’m getting more music, but it took me a few times through – and then checking out the digital of the original – to piece together why I was falling out of the listen at the midway point: I’m an idiot who’s sensitive to sequencing.

I’m sure there are runtime reasons we couldn’t have done the live tracks at the end and labeled them as bonus tracks, but I think that’s how my ears would’ve preferred it. Back to the big plus, though: the core release is truly excellent; the ‘bonuses’ are also excellent, and unless you were cool enough to get one of the 57 copies of the original, this is now you’re way to own the songs on a physical format.