Faun Fables, the long-running collaboration between Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl, have returned with Counterclockwise, the follow-up to 2016’s Born of the Sun. With the longest space between albums in the band’s twenty-seven year history, the nature of time and experience spent raising a family and negotiating life’s changes have much to do with the incredible listening companion Faun Fables have gifted us here.
Counterclockwise’s songs and production are the most encompassing, richly lived-in sonic world of their seven full-length albums. From start to finish, it is an exquisitely etched portrait of their aesthetic and worldview: colourfully studded with fine-hewed jewels of song, tinged with the traditional sounds of past and future nations.
Their timeless “songtelling” practice is entwined with a holistic view of a life in music — embracing and celebrating the mundane details of home, partnering and family, elevated by a mystical and fantastical perspective. The new discovery here is their creative relationship with time. As Dawn notes in the album liner:
“Time… the most fertile & playful of mediums, though full of mist... We mustn’t forget time offers itself first as something to be creatively shaped.”
To this end, the title conception of “counterclockwise” spins alternatively to the accepted definition of going against the grain of time. In the Faun family, the passage of time is an affirmative process evolving through old and new generations. Their time in the world is an exception to the view of aging into infirmity and death. Instead, it is one of eternal return, of thought, belief and shared experience living on, becoming young and growing again. And again!
Counterclockwise began to take form in 2020, its songs brought together from over a span of fifteen years. Some came from commissioned projects about werewolves, Mother Goose and other fairy tales. Others were rooted in familial traditions: “The Wedding” was conceived as an ideal air to be sung at such a gathering; “Lullaby,” a bedtime melody for children, and “Ember Bell,” a meditation on the organic complexities of pregnancy. “Widdershins,” “Woolsey Street & the Lake of Fire,” “Hiawatha,” and “Black Angels (Czarne Anioły)” have been featured on recent Faun Fables tours and so represent time in the world before Counterclockwise. Similarly, several cover songs salute crucial companions from different points in their individual and collective lives, making deep cuts from Yes and the Bee Gees — as well as the theme song to 70s television program Grizzly Adams — into further chapters of shaped time, well lived and loved, to indelibly light this collection.
Counterclockwise is the first Faun Fables album engineered and produced by Dawn and Nils from start to finish. Taking the wheel in the tradition of the engineers that taught them, they have created a living atmosphere of songs and family. The chiming and twinkling of bells throughout evokes the richness of the years and the passage of time. Highlighting the spirit of play, Nils brings his multi-instrumental vision (as heard in Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Free Salamander Exhibit), contributing on guitar, bass, flutes, voice, glockenspiel, drums, harmonium, trombone and tenor sax. Dawn and Nils’ wide-ranging vocal harmony tradition is enriched by the voices of their daughters Edda, Ura and Gurdrin, who contribute on keyboards and percussion, as well. Norwegian guitarist Arild Hammerø lends his singular guitar craft on the songs “Ember Bell”, “Hiawatha”, “Wonderous Stories” (on which he also sings) and “Maybe”, as well as the final, essential sounds that close the album.
Dedicated with love to Dawn’s late father, Edward ‘Will’ McCarthy, Counterclockwise is an evocation of the essential truth and joy of Faun Fables’ relationship with time, the greatest value they can imagine to give to anyone who listens to their music