Absence and her sister highlights Eriksen and Irvine’s imagination, minimalist restraint and the preternatural mind-meld of longtime collaborators with a history of coloring outside the lines. With decades of South Indian veena under his belt, Eriksen knows his way around a fretboard. But with the exception of the quietly virtuosic guitar work on Amelia, and the oud-like improvisation on his bespoke fretless bajo-sexto in Song of the Lost Hunter, here Eriksen favors the haunting insistence of two alternating chords (Jolly Tinker, Two Sisters, Fitchburg Tragedy) or even two alternating notes (Every Sound Below). In the epic tale of ghostly vengeance As She Sank She Rose Again, he forgoes instrumentation altogether, showcasing the unaccompanied solo balladry for which he is celebrated. (Iconic balladeer and folklorist Jean Ritchie even chose him as the only-ever recipient of the Jean Ritchie Musical Heritage Award). Irvine’s accompanying percussion is also suitably sparse throughout, though not lacking in its own moments of understated virtuosity (Boston, I Wish The Wars Were All Over) and the cinematic colors of bowed and struck metallophones that hint at his background in orchestra and theater.
The stories are both strange and strangely familiar. A Tiny Crown is a kind of watery dream about a childhood inhabited by Sea Monkeys, while Every Sound Below explores a moonlit field, wondering if the silver orb is a sister or just another rock, and resting with fireflies in the ephemeral glow of earth and moon and sound itself. Other songs tell of loneliness so desperate it leads one woman to murder, and worse, (Song of the Lost Hunter), the tragic loss of four young cousins in the town of Eriksen’s birth (The Fitchburg Tragedy), an instrument, made of a sister’s bones, that can play only a single tune (Two Sisters), a young woman who turns to soldiering to find her lost love, (I Wish The Wars Were All Over), and cannibalism narrowly averted (Boston). The album ends with the old Macedonian song Aber Dojde Donke, a profound and beautiful expression of sevdah, a Turkish word for a kind of love that aches and yearns, yet remains love all the same. The casual listener might call the songs “dark,” but if you don’t immediately hear the duo’s delight in them, you might listen again more closely. These are fundamentally songs of love, not “murder ballads,” and there is no shortage of triumph and joy throughout, whether ecstatic (Boston), contemplative (Amelia) or quotidian (Jolly Tinker). And even in its darkest moments, Absence and her sister shines with creativity, compassion and the gentle humor of two musicians who really like playing together, and have done it a lot.
Captured live and unprocessed by “minimal microphone” recordist Barry Diament, the three-dimensional immediacy of the performances on Absence and her sister offers fleshy respite from the hyper-real, the ultra-processed and AI slop of post-postmodernity. The album invites the listener, not to suspend disbelief, but to engage with it. If the duo’s sound is an echo from an ancient time, it is perhaps a time that is only now coming to light. Absence and her sisteris a celebration of embodiment and little moments- of space and place- in which the urgency of the musicians’ punk and experimental roots finds voice in quietness and restraint something like the understated intensity of starlight. The album abounds in twos: two musicians, two microphones, the two alternating notes of Every Sound Below, the Two Sisters of the song and the other two of the album’s title. But the character of Eriksen and Irvine’s twoness is conscientiously not binary. It’s more the twoness of bridge and nut, the anchors at each end necessary for a string to find its voice- two as the smallest number of points that can contain what isn’t either/or.
---Penelope Cornfield, Slanderville Media Group
coming spring 2026