Album art by Jonathan Snead and Ben Hjertmann
Style: Dream pop, math rock, indie folk, experimental (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gentle Giant, toe, Sungazer
Country: USA (North Carolina)
Release date: 7 April 2025
As the saying goes, there is a fine line between genius and insanity. To become a visionary in a given field, one needs a combination of obsessive focus and a disconnect from conventional lines of thinking that can easily come across as a bit unhinged, especially to the lay observer. Without years upon years of study, there’s little to distinguish such concepts as, say, statistical Riemannian manifolds or the Lagrangian formulation of physics’ Standard Model from the laborious ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic’s notebook. Music theory is no exception; sure, the basics of key signatures and chord progressions are simple enough to grasp, but in the deepest depths of the theory iceberg, one can run across bizarre ideas like xenharmonics, Partch lattices, and Klumpenhoewer networks that might as well be the Necronomicon to the uninitiated who attempt to comprehend them.
Enter North Carolina-based composer, luthier, and possible madman Ben Hjertmann, with his newly assembled math/folk/dream-pop project Spiral Garden. A longtime acolyte of Just Intonation and all things microtonal, Hjertmann has hand-built and retooled over a dozen instruments into bespoke, painstakingly intricate tuning ratios for the band’s debut album, weaving together obscure, esoteric aspects of meter and tonality into an awe-inspiringly overengineered musical Kabbalah. The end result? One of the most unique-sounding albums I have ever heard, to the point where putting a pin in its sound is nigh impossible. Roughly speaking, though, I would say that Spiral Garden does to Appalachian folk music what peak-era Gentle Giant did to European baroque and medieval traditions: adding in contemporary rock elements while maintaining a consistent dedication to rhythmic intricacy, compositional left turns, and playing as many different instruments as possible. More modern comparisons could be drawn to toe‘s gentle, spacey take on math rock and the similarly overthought, multilayered visions of Appalachia spun forth by Adjy, but for the most part this album is decidedly its own beast.
For all its seemingly intimidating complexity, the album makes a clear effort to ease the listener into things, with “Septangle” starting with a soft, clean guitar line in 7/8 time beneath Hjertmann’s gentle tenor. Not exactly bubblegum pop, but certainly accessible enough. Yet, as the tune winds on, with Jonathan Snead’s viol and Emalee Hunnicutt’s bass adding additional layers that form a complex, interweaving mesh of an arrangement, a sense begins to grow that this music isn’t quite of this earth. It isn’t “extraterrestrial”, really—the instrumentation has an organic, lived-in feel and the lyrics are pointedly terrestrial, speaking of the temporal cycles that drive the seasons around us and push humans through stagnation and fleeting pleasures alike. Rather, it feels like watching a late spring sunset from a back porch in an alternate reality, where children read Berenstein Bears novels, Nelson Mandela died in prison, and Western music tonality is based on exact whole-number frequency ratios tuned using the 60Hz hum of old electrical wiring1.
The rest of the album winds further into the weeds of unorthodox music theory, calling forth more visions from a series of existences slightly orthogonal to our own with largely successful results. At its best, Spiral Garden communicates a sentimentality that is somewhat askew yet deeply heartfelt, a dreamlike filter over nostalgic summertime memories that tints them with a color you don’t quite have a name for. A clear example is “Heirophony”, which takes its fancy 15/8 meter and exotic 5-limit tuning and turns it into a deliriously beautiful indie folk almost-waltz, striking the very core of my soul in a place I didn’t know existed. A similar beauty thrums through the whisper-soft lullaby of closer “A View from the Trees”, where Hjertmann’s tender vocals and the gentle layering of acoustic and slide guitars are so enrapturing that its 60/16 time and multiple massive modulations go almost unnoticed. And it’s not just the pretty stuff that lands, either. “Shovel” is the song where the band’s Appalachian roots are most apparent, with Hjertmann adding three strings to an actual shovel to form a lead instrument that ends up sounding something like a cross between a banjo and a sitar. Its lyrics of tradition and nature colliding with capitalism feel authentic and lived-in, and it’s just fun to hear this bunch of theory nerds unwind a little with a comparatively direct, rootsy bop.
Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to craft an album this innovative without some experiments going awry, and Spiral Garden are no exception. Sometimes they just go a bit too far, as in “Aurora”, the weirdest track out of an already eccentric bunch. While the intricate hocketing and syllabic interplay between Hjertmann and Hunnicutt’s voices is undeniably impressive, and the distorted rhythm guitar is a nice change of pace, on the whole its overindulgence in polyrhythm makes it come across as a bit of a mess, and its spacey tone and overly abstract lyrics play counter to the band’s strengths. On the opposite side of the coin we have “Beal-Four Island Industrial Park Museum”, a dreamlike instrumental soundscape whose atmospherics are lovely for a while, but end up dragging a tad over its nine-minute runtime. Most unfortunate, though, is “Shadow Key”, whose fascinating concept of two microtonal modes colliding to form a perception of C major is sabotaged by Will Beasley’s snare hits landing with bafflingly off-beat timing, alongside various jarringly dissonant notes sprinkled haphazardly throughout like 100% cacao chocolate chips in a cookie. I’m sure there’s some deep polymetric/microtonal rationale behind all this that I don’t have enough music doctorates to understand, but the fact remains that these sounds, on an instinctive, lizard-brain level, are fundamentally unpleasant in a way that, as other songs on the album prove, they don’t have to be.
And yet, despite all these complaints, I find myself with a deep, abiding affection for Spiral Garden that goes well beyond my awe and respect at the sheer effort and attention to detail that has so clearly been put into its every nook and cranny. It is a captivating, uncompromisingly unique piece of art that, at its best, stuns me in a way no album ever has. Even its stumbles are simply evidence of just how many creative risks have been taken here, how hard Hjertmann and co. have swung for the fences, and I’d take that over Dull Yet Competent Neo-Prog Album #734 any day. This is an album by and for massive nerds, but one with an instinctively accessible, deeply human emotional core, and I eagerly await whatever twisted tesseracts of theory these guys will send listeners spiraling down next time.
Recommended tracks: Septangle, Heirophony, Shovel, A View from the Trees
You may also like: Adjy, Anathallo, Mingjia, foot foot, The Mercury Tree
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook
Spiral Garden is:
– Ben Hjertmann (lead vocals, various handcrafted guitars and keyboards, percussion, sampling)
– Emmalee Hunnicutt (fretless bass, cello, backing and co-lead vocals)
– Graham Thomason (synth, piano, organ, backing vocals)
– Jonathan Snead (viola da gamba, hammered dulcitar, autoharp, slide guitar, backing vocals)
With guests:
– Will Beasley (drums, except where noted)
– Zack Kampf (drums on “Septangle”)
– Daniel Richardson (soprano sax on “Shadow Key”)
– RJ Wuagneux (guitar solo on “Septangle”, additional guitars on “Beal-Four Island Industrial Park Museum”)
– Dave Bullard (drums on “Aurora”)
– Hinton Egerton (theremin on “Aurora” and “Beal-Four Island Industrial Park Museum”)
– Jonathon Sale (tabla on “Paramonde”)
– Lane Claffe (additional guitars on “Beal-Four Island Industrial Park Museum”)
- Not only does the band “tune to your fridge”, but they have put forward a genuine offer to sell a pitch-shifted copy of the album to any listeners in countries that use 50Hz current instead. These people are committed. ↩︎
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