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# Blake Hornsby :: Brugmansia
- URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/blake-hornsby-brugmansia/
- Published: 2026-08-24T07:56:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T07:56:50.000Z
- Description: Blake Hornsby’s Brugmansia lets raga, acid folk, birdsong and altered voices grow together until pastoral beauty begins to carry its own toxicity.
- Author: Hwael Mag
- Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Field Recordings, Psych Folk, Pastoral

### Plants of the genus *Brugmansia* carry their flowers facing downward: large trumpets, clearly visible even at dusk, containing tropane alkaloids capable of profoundly altering perception.

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It is an unusually precise title for Blake Hornsby’s new album. Not because the music tries to simulate intoxication, but because almost everything here appears familiar until it is looked at closely.

Released by Monadnock Sound & Vision, *Brugmansia* follows 2023’s *A Village of Many Springs*, largely instrumental. Hornsby preserves part of that record’s vocabulary — fingerpicked guitar, drone, instruments from the Indian classical tradition, a patience with duration that points back to American Primitive — but now songs have entered the clearing. And they do not bring much order with them.

“Solananceae” establishes the record almost as a botanical classification before a musical one. Environmental sound occupies enough space to make the boundary between composition and habitat uncertain. What follows seems to grow from this first plot: strings, voices, guitar and small acoustic disturbances appear like neighbouring organisms, sometimes competing for the same light.

This method matters because *Brugmansia* brings together instruments carrying very different histories. Mallar Goswami’s tabla lives alongside Helena Espvall’s cello; Buck Curran enters with electric guitar and E-Bow, Gwen Young with flute and voice, Sam Fanthorpe with violin and voice, David Colohan with whistle. Hornsby adds sitar and a series of less domesticated sounds. What is remarkable is how rarely all this feels like the contents of an ethnographic cupboard overturned onto a folk record. The instruments preserve a certain resistance to one another.

“The Child and the Crow” is the point where Hornsby’s writing reveals its peculiar scale. There is something deliberately elementary in its figures — child, bird, voice, recurring acoustic gestures — but that simplicity behaves suspiciously, like an old illustration whose margins have gathered annotations left by different owners. Here folk memory is already second-hand, and yet inevitably, through some necessary virtue, the magic happens: we are taken back to places many of us would like to inhabit, the world of 1970s record covers, where landscape and human figures, grass, clothes, faces and light seemed to have been printed together.

The title track pushes further into instability. *Brugmansia* is itself a South American genus transplanted into the gardens of warmer regions across the world, where something capable of causing serious poisoning can grow innocently beside a wall or a terrace. Hornsby’s music proceeds through a similar transplantation; the field recording seems slightly out of alignment with reality.

This becomes particularly clear in “While Lying in a Field of *Datura stramonium*”. The title introduces another member of the Solanaceae, another plant surrounded by a long and irregular history of medicine, poisoning and hallucination. Altered voices and string instruments make it difficult to locate the human presence with any precision. Rather than staging some kind of pastoral communion with vegetation, Hornsby allows the field to remain chemically indifferent to whoever has decided to lie down in it.

“Rishikesh” carries a different historical weight. The Himalayan city entered the Western popular imagination with particular force during the counterculture’s movement towards Indian spirituality, and its name inevitably drags that archive behind it. Hornsby does not escape this genealogy: tabla, strings and extended duration make it audible. The piece proceeds like a religious cadence by Piano Magic flooded with acid-folk absorption, but continually diverted by a storyteller’s instinct, as though the ritual had to remember, each time, that it is also a story.

By the time “Eaecanalos” arrives, the album has accumulated enough birds, breaths, strings, electronic manipulations and uncertain voices to make the initial taxonomy useless. This may be the quietest achievement of *Brugmansia*. Hornsby begins with recognisable musical species and ends by making classification less and less reliable.

The ancestors are evident, and many of them would be easy to name. But ancestry is not exactly the subject. *Brugmansia* is about what happens after transplantation: which forms survive, which mutate, which become ornamental and which retain enough poison to remain dangerous.

A flower can travel very far and keep its chemistry intact.

[Brugmansia by Blake Hornsby](https://monadnocksound.bandcamp.com/album/brugmansia?ref=hwaelmag.com) 

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