Folkadelphia Session: Marian McLaughlin

A year before we had her into the studio, Marian McLaughlin, a songwriter living in Washington D.C. (but born in Philly, she wrote with emphasis), sent me an out-of-the-blue email in which she detailed her unique technique. She described her music as “fractal folk,” an ingenious take on finger-picking style guitar work layered with a unique system of storytelling. She wrote that she makes her own myths while elaborating upon others, that her songs “explore existence, alliteration, assonance, and dissonance.” That really struck me as interesting – not only thinking about the “what” that she’s singing and playing, but the “how” she’s singing and playing, and about how those elements interact and sound together. This is truly macro- and micro-music making. To listen to McLaughlin is to go on a trance-like journey, letting the music point, push, and drive the audience’s thought process based on the changing geography of the soundscape. This is done with intention. McLaughlin has incorporated the tenets of dérive into her writing and playing. Dérive developed as a concept in psychogeographics in 1940s Parisian artistic and political collectives and was taken up in the 1950s by Situtational Theorist Guy Debord. The idea is that a person would be led on an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, via the aesthetic conditions of the surrounding architecture and geography. The goal being to encounter a new experience and escape the monotony and predictability of every day life and routine. Extrapolate this idea to music and you arrive (or I should say, you may be led) to Marian McLaughlin and her brand new album, aptly named Dérive.

Marian and her bassist Ethan Foote joined us at the WXPN Studio to perform new music and lead us on an uncanny and unusual musical expedition.