Fish Pond Fish [Red Copper]

Fish Pond Fish is one of geology, meteorology, ornithology, astronomy and botany. 

Band members Dave Senft (vocals, bass), Don Mitchell (vocals, guitar, banjo), Auyon Mukharji (vocals, violin, mandolin), and Harris Paseltiner (vocals, cello, guitar) have created a natural history in song. An album that catalogues the weird nooks of our world with the same curiosity of a botanist’s time-worn field journal. We’re led through old growth forests, down to the deep sea’s ‘true blue bottom where the light ends,’ and up to a few singled-out stars that shine ‘ochre’ overhead. Introduced with Woolgathering—as much a beckoning as it is a first track—we are then taken through an album of gardens, orchard rows, almond groves, and past morning glory vines. With daisies and tidal shifts, singing cicadas and insects blowing over the ocean, murmurations of starlings and a circling sparrow hawk, we enter an ecology of emotional experience.  “Through the oak and poison ivy,” the four sing in Green + Evergreen, “As the lemon light was alkalining / I was growing, I was dying / Growing I was dying.” Here is an album to use alkaline when thinking sunlight, and, more, finds the word best to describe that great organic paradox of growing towards death.  

Fish Pond Fish was October 2020's Magnolia Record Club Record of the Month.