Rites & Revelations by Laura Jurd

For fans of Cisnienie, The New Eves, Natural Snow Buildings, free jazz, and that eerie feeling that you’re living through the opening shot of a horror movie, Rites & Revelations by Laura Jurd captures all the inherent darkness of traditional European folk music with a style steeped in contemporary jazz. Traditional folk music from all around the world oftentimes contains the solemn recognition of the cruelty of premodern life, accompanied by a flippant fearlessness of death which we’ve long since left in the past. Through both more typical means, like fiddles and flutes, and novel introductions, like bebop horn leads and a frantic drum kit, we experience that era which weathered the great plagues, which witnessed famine and war so ridiculous as to break our modern imaginations. As we continue to knock our world off balance and invite a new generation of calamity, we must turn back to the old forms while retaining all our more recent understanding, if not for comfort then at the very least to connect us with generations of ancestors worldwide who’ve fallen to similar fates.