When he isn’t fronting The Fatty Acids or recording much of Milwaukee’s music scene at Silver City Studios, Josh Evert is out gathering both inspiration and instrumentation from nature. Evert’s 2015 residency at Homestead National Monument resulted in the symphony of field recordings on Not Uninhabited. He followed it with Uncle Sam’s Club For The Agoraphobic, an EP he recorded during a stint with ACRE in Steuben, Wisconsin in 2016. Following a two-week residency at Denali National Park last July, Evert is back with another naturalistic release.

Evert’s new Braided River EP was produced after he happened upon a group of dead trees while on a hike. He says he “plucked” a branch and liked the way it sounded, so he started recording samples.

“I was absolutely blown away by the rich tones of the branches,” Evert says. “Each branch revealed a different timbre depending on its diameter, length and structural integrity, so I took hundreds of samples. Digitizing and fine-tuning the samples, I built a chromatic midi instrument completely out of branch plucks.”

The 15-minute composition features hundreds of samples from those tress, which Evert wove into an interesting and unique sonic tapestry, which he released today. Listen to it below or download it for $2 on Bandcamp.

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Co-Founder and Editor

Before co-founding Milwaukee Record, Tyler Maas wrote for virtually every Milwaukee publication (except Wassup! Magazine). He lives in Bay View and enjoys both stuff and things.