When I realized that I was happily on my way back to the world of radio after a terribly painful hiatus discovering this new town of Portland, OR and finding the place on the air I could call my own, I proudly announced on several experimental music internet lists that I would be jockeying the airstreams again. Almost immediately I got a message reply from a lady named Jessamyn asking if I ever intended to have live musical guests. I honestly hadn't given it any thought yet, so anxious was I to mingle my own cd collection with the KPSU library and unleash the spawn on the world. But Jessamyn had a friend who played under the name In Gowan Ring, and he had a website: ingowanring.com. So I went, and I listened, and I scheduled a date.

In Gowan Ring is the mostly one-man project of B'eirth, or simply "Bee", who plays psychedelic folk music in the tradition of Nick Drake and Donovan. He arrived at the station alone with a guitar case and put on a simple but beautiful and mesmerizing set of songs laced with imagery of his travels and meditations in under populated natural locales. In addition to being a gracious guest he left a couple cds to add to the KPSU library. The newest one is a bit more of a group project called Birch Book - Vol I.

The songs, twelve in all, of Birch Book, were recorded in New England from 2002 - 2004. It is interesting to note those 21st Century dates on a recording absent of any of the electronics we generally associate with this dawning century. The effect is much more timeless than dated, however, and the album does make some very nice concessions to electricity, most notably the Telecaster guitar playing of Seth Eames. Along with Annabel Lee on Viola, there is a subtle (of course!) but strong counterpoint to Bee's own acoustic guitar and voice. While the gothic/psychedelic folk sounds of his In Gowan Ring work are still there, the group brings out a decidedly "post-rock" element, though still entirely on the mellow extreme side. Fans of Will Oldham's early Palace recordings might well enjoy the Birch Book album quite a bit. I suppose what that really means is that the British folk influences are blended with some more American ones tinged slightly with country and blues instrumentation. Bee's music is in general very reflective, in Birch Book there seems to be a touch of bittersweet melancholy to this reflection.

I enjoy the whole album a lot, and have been perhaps looking for such a respite to some of the more aggressive and noise oriented other sounds I equally adore. It's hard not to marvel at the subtlety of Bee's guitar playing as well as the diversity of additional instruments including cittern, piano, recorder, mouthharp, jew's harp, folk harp, xylophone, and percussion, all placed so as to be highly effective and often barely noticeable at the same time. There are a couple lyrical standout tracks for me personally in "How the Hours..." and "Easy to Live" both of which evoke a theme of a need to escape stagnation and get out into the world (or at least get out of town). In a nod to post-modernism, the simply crafted cardboard case, with a nifty distribution deal with indie stalwarts Secretly Canadian, bears some packaging tricks such as beginning and ending with an instrumental called "Birch Bark" and counting the twelfth track as "13."

B'eirth returns to Portland on the Winter Solstice, Wednesday, December 21st, in his In Gowan Ring incarnation at the Mizpah Church Rectory. Visit his website for further details. Birch Book also has its own site: birchbook.com