Author: Max Brzezinski
If you’d like us to send you/your group an Artist Questionnaire, message ncmusic@dncr.nc.gov
As the forward-facing arm of The North Carolina Music Office, Come Hear NC wants to share delight in all things music within our state. To this end, we’ve sent a Come Hear NC Artist Questionnaire to a host of musicians from the mountains to the coast. On a rolling basis, we’ll be publishing their responses so you can get to know the many talented artists of North Carolina who are not yet household names.
Why a questionnaire you might ask? First, it lets the musicians speak directly about their lives and work, without a filter. Second, because the artists all are replying to the same questions, it's pretty interesting to compare answers between bands. Finally, a Q-and-A's a great way to casually get to know a group without having to read a long essay from start to finish. So if you like an answer or two in a questionnaire, we suggest you put their music on or try to go see them live.
Note: the Come Hear NC questionnaire is a long list of questions, but musicians only answer the ones that interest them most.
Up today, Magic Tuber Stringband.
Capsule summary-style, describe your band(s) (its members, home, history):
Evan Morgan: We started as a duo in 2018. Courtney and I had played together in various projects throughout college. We've been based in Durham loosely since starting, but Courtney's work has taken her to Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and now Oregon so we've had many temporary "hometowns". Our friend Mike joined the band in 2023 after moving back to Durham to study jazz bass at NC Central.
How long have you been in North Carolina, and what's your relationship with the state?
Evan: Courtney and I have been in and out of NC for the past few years (again, due to Courtney's work). But we both did undergrad at Duke and have more or less called NC home since 2015. I have family roots in Georgia and Courtney is originally from Georgia so we both grew up visiting NC frequently. We both kind of found our creative voices during our time in college and our relationship to the Triangle scene at the time was hugely, hugely influential.
What North Carolina artists do you listen to most?
Evan: When we started, artists like House and Land, Nathan Bowles, and Daniel Bachman (then living in Durham) were super important for us. We were both DJs at WXDU and involved in helping run the WXDU/Three Lobed Recordings shows at Kings in Raleigh. Three Lobed as a label has always been an important touchstone for us. I also started going to shows at the Nightlight when I moved to the area in 2015. Nightlight mainstays like Crowmeat Bob, Zeke Graves (Osawa Tome), Secret Boyfriend, MARV, Tallulah Cloos etc. etc. are constantly on our minds. We have toured and played with the band Weirs (members of two other more straight-ahead indie rock groups, Sluice and Fust).
Most slept-on, underrated North Carolina artist?
Evan: Too many to list... For now I will say Tallulah Cloos and Devon Flaherty.
Favorite North Carolina musical memory/moment?
Evan: The last Disco Sweat at the Nightlight.
Courtney Werner: My favorite is when we performed the Tony Conrad with Faust record at Hopscotch in 2023 with a 9-person formation of the Signal Lamp Ensemble. I spent many hours transcribing the drone portion of the record into a visual score, which was a very cool experience for me. Mike DeVito, Rex Murray, and Nathan Bowles also transcribed the percussion session. We performed two thirty-minute pieces at 11pm in Nash Hall... it was a feat of endurance and a moment of total immersion in these pieces that has been such a source of inspiration to me. It was really special to be able to bring them to life for our community at Hopscotch.
Favorite non-musical North Carolina memory/moment?
Evan: Passing the first few months of the pandemic with our friends in Hayesville, NC.
Courtney: I will second this. We were fortunate to live with a group of our closest friends on the side of a mountain near Hayesville. We spent the spring of 2020 observing the mountain come alive with wildflowers, mushrooms, birds, salamanders, etc. and were inspired to write and record Tarantism.
Earliest North Carolina memories?
Evan: Hiking up to the Calloway Peak on Grandfather Mountain and getting caught in a thunderstorm with my dad and older sister.
Courtney: My earliest memory was backpacking in Pisgah National Forest right before coming to Durham for college.
Has North Carolina been a good place to be a musician?
Evan: Absolutely, hard to think of anywhere better.
Courtney: Yes! I feel so fortunate to be shaped by the vibrant community here.
What would make it better?
Evan: Public funding and support for venues. The loss of the Nightlight has hit us pretty hard and would have been avoidable with better commercial tenant protections (especially for businesses providing an invaluable cultural resource for the community!).
What is the musical community around you like?
Evan: Super supportive of each other. Many play in each other's projects and are interested in setting up shows which bridge genres/scenes.
Were your inclinations towards music encouraged?
Courtney: I was put in classical violin lessons at a very young age and continued them through the end of high school. My inclinations towards music were more enforced than encouraged. By the time I came to North Carolina, I was burnt out on the stuffy classical culture and didn't even bring my violin with me to my first semester of college. But once I was in Durham, I met Evan and was drawn into the old time and experimental improv scenes that thrive here. I could finally break out of the constraints of classical technique and discover my love for noise, drone, repetition, and group improv.
Technique, feeling, and concept — what's the relation to you as a musician? As a listener?
Courtney: The concept of place is very important to us as a band. We often interpret "folk" music as place-based music and enjoy experimenting with this idea. We have done recordings or performances at locations throughout the southeast that have particularly resonant histories and structures, like old wells or railway tunnels. Sometimes we take field recordings, and sometimes we try to interpret the soundscape or even just the quality or feeling of a place with our instruments. For example, we wrote Needlefall after being inspired by the repetitive, visual quality of the miles and miles of loblolly pine stands that stretch across central and southeast Georgia, where I was living at the time.
Are there misconceptions about you and/or your music you'd like to correct?
Evan: Yeah while we have been super influenced by Appalachian old-time fiddlers, we are not really an "Appalachian" band. We've been influenced by traditional music from Arkansas, Texas, and Georgia. But mostly, we've been influenced by contemporary artists' based out of the Triangle (see above).
Do you view your music as self-expression? Or is it more abstract? Or both?
Courtney: Not necessarily "self-expression". For me, making music is one of my favorite ways of interacting with the cultural and ecological traditions of the places I live, as well as with the other artists I am fortunate enough to spend time around. Maybe with a divine presence too. I prefer to think of it as something that originates from beyond myself, but that I can spend a lifetime trying to access and channel.
How has your work changed over time?
Evan: We have become much more interested in exploring the line between composition, improvisation, and minimalism. While this interest is still related to "traditional music" or fiddle tunes, we are interested in making these connections less overt.
Is there a red thread that connects your earliest work to your most recent?
Evan: An interest in the sound and music of certain places, primarily those in which we have lived and worked.
Does spirituality affect your music?
Courtney: We have an interest in how music is used in religious/spiritual practice and I think these influences are pretty apparent in our past work. We listen to music that is overtly meant for worship (gospel, sacred harp) and music that is associated with trance/altered states (drone, minimalism, electronic/dance).
Do you care about gear?
Courtney: Our "gear" typically consists of 9+ wooden, acoustic instruments with a combined age of several centuries, which can be a big challenge to manage when we are on tour in a single mid-size SUV and it's raining, snowing, too dry, too cold, too hot... you name it. The instruments can all be quite temperamental and we have days that feel like a comedy of errors trying to take care of them, but we've done alright so far.
Do you care about music critics and what they write?
Evan: We do. We have been lucky to receive support from NC writers like Brian Howe, Dan Ruccia, and Harris Wheless in the past. While the national PR game can be pretty frustrating, we have always received strong support from local outlets like Indy Week which we are super thankful for!
What is the typical "workflow" for one of your songs from beginning to end?
Courtney: Evan mentioned this a little bit below, but we value both composition and improvisation in our songs. Often a song comes about when one of us spends some time improvising solo and settles on a vague structure. We'll bring that structure to the bigger group, and let the composition take shape organically. We are fortunate to have such an inspired community of musicians that have played with us, and we love letting a song take shape as a collective effort. Often there are segments of the song that are never truly nailed down and change each time we perform. It makes touring especially fun because parts of the songs change depending on the way a show feels. Last year, for example, we performed at a church venue called Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, and the reverberation was incredible. Some of the quiet, improvised portions of our set really took off in a way that they haven't anywhere else.
What's the relation between electronic and mechanical/acoustic instruments in your work?
Evan: We are entirely acoustic and always have been. We do however listen to a lot of electronic music, especially more abstract, droney, and/or industrial music. I think what we aim for sometimes in our compositions is not at all different from what certain electronic musicians aim for in terms of its effect (trance states) and its tambres and layers of texture. So while we limit ourselves to acoustic instruments, electronic music is always present in an indirect kind of way.
Do you need constraints to work within or long stretches of unstructured time?
Evan: All of our music rides this line between constraint and improvisation. Our songs often develop from small ideas which take shape through being rehearsed and played live, often with elements of improvisation. It's our continued interest to explore this territory between improvisation and composition which in a lot of ways is a common theme in the development of vernacular or folk music.
Whose musical career serves as a model or touchstone for your work?
Evan: Tony Conrad as a filmmaker, musician, and theoretician. His ideas have always been a guiding light for us (read his brief essay about Sacred Harp music!). While we lack his knack for humor, his ability to make serious work without taking himself or making his audience take himself too seriously makes him an ideal role model in our opinions.
What do you think of the contemporary state of music in NC and in general? Moving forward, stuck, or declining?
Evan: There has been a lot of attention on the state's younger indie bands which has been very cool to see. However, it still feels like other more experimental artists lack the attention of their contemporaries in big cities like LA, Chicago, and NYC. It would be great if the national spotlight widened a bit to include genres other than indie rock because the scene in NC is vast a filled with artists making music unique to the state!
Hopes and schemes for 2025 and beyond?
Evan: We are playing at Big Ears in March and will be playing a few shows around it. We are hoping to have a new record together before the end of the year.