> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Guitar Gives Way: Daniel Bachman in Five Records - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-guitar-gives-way-daniel-bachman-in-five-records/ - Published: 2026-10-29T18:04:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-29T18:04:33.000Z - Description: An essay on Daniel Bachman’s guitar and the Virginia sounds that joined it. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Essays, 2026, Folk, Field Recordings, Fingerstyle Guitar ### Until 2018 Daniel Bachman’s records were the sound of one man’s hands on a guitar. Eight years after *The Morning Star*, much of what we hear on *The Witness Tree* comes from sixteen trees across Virginia and the ground around them. --- Daniel Bachman was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1989, and made his name in the tradition of American solo steel-string guitar that descends from John Fahey and his Takoma label. His early albums keep to that tradition’s terms: one player, one instrument, pieces long enough to lose yourself in. From 2018 the proportions began to change. On most of the records he has made since, a growing share of the sound comes from somewhere other than his hands, and that somewhere is nearly always Virginia. Radio and field recordings came first, then the places themselves; after those came emergency broadcasts, family history and, last of all, trees, each taking over some part of what the guitar had once managed unaided. The five records at the centre of this essay can all be found on his Bandcamp page, where Bachman calls himself an independent scholar of the folk histories of Virginia. The phrase fits, since each record also works as an inquiry into who and what was there before him. ### I. The radio and the map *The Morning Star* (Three Lobed, 27 July 2018) was made between September 2016 and January 2018, after Bachman had moved back to Virginia from North Carolina. The liner notes set the album against that homecoming, the 2016 US presidential election and a pause after years on the road, and they describe the opening track, “Invocation”, as a statement of intent. The credits list six- and twelve-string guitar alongside AM radio recordings and field recordings, most of the latter made by Bachman himself. The fiddle and harmonium that guests contribute to “Invocation” are instruments in the ordinary sense. The radio and the field recordings belong to another order altogether, and they are the first sounds on any of his records to come from outside music. *Axacan* (Three Lobed, 7 May 2021) covers more ground. According to the notes, Bachman recorded all of it between January and June 2020, and the credited locations read like an itinerary: an apartment in Petersburg, Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Crows Nest Natural Area Preserve, Popes Creek, Shenandoah National Park, Weakley Hollow Road and Ferry Farm. The last of these is at once his family’s homestead, a plantation reputed to be haunted, a Civil War battlefield and a former home of George Washington. Bachman presents the album as a collage of guitar, harmonium, field recordings and treated radio, and links it to climate change, the pandemic and the legacy of colonial violence. ### II. The warned area *Almanac Behind* (Three Lobed, 18 November 2022) is where the weather forces its way in. The album follows a spell of extreme weather and what came after it, using field recordings, altered traditional instruments and NOAA Weather Radio, whose broadcasts Bachman picked up at his home in Banco, in Madison County. Three of the fifteen titles carry a time and the call sign of the local transmitter: “8:35 PM KHB36 (Alter Course)”, “10:17 PM KHB36 (The Warned Area)” and “3:24 AM KHB36 (When the World’s On Fire)”. The running order partly follows the sequence in which the warnings went out. Other people supplied recordings too. Will Thornton is credited with flood audio, Dianne Bachman with fire audio on “Think Before You Breathe” and Sarah Bachman with church recordings. Here Daniel Bachman is as much an editor of what reaches him from the country around his house as he is a player. [Almanac Behind by Daniel Bachman](https://danielbachman.bandcamp.com/album/almanac-behind?ref=hwaelmag.com) Within a year, fire no longer reached him at second hand. The Quaker Run Fire broke out on 24 October 2023 on Double Top Mountain, near his home, and burned for twenty-five days across more than 4,000 acres. Bachman released a standalone piece for fiddle and guitar, built around his recordings of the fire and of the equipment brought in to fight it, and put the fire’s dates in its title. *When the Roses Come Again* (Three Lobed, 17 November 2023) turns from weather to inheritance. It was assembled from a week of improvisations on guitar, banjo, fiddle and mouth bow, recorded in March 2023 in a cabin at Weakley Hollow, near Shenandoah National Park, and edited over the months that followed. Bachman connects the record to the Hostetler Blind Family Band, a nineteenth-century string band in his family tree, and his notes describe it as a move away from the steel-string guitar. It seems fitting that so much of the work passes to banjo and fiddle, the instruments a family string band would have played. ### III. Sixteen trees *The Witness Tree*, issued on 2 October 2026, was made over some nineteen months at sixteen witness trees across Virginia, trees old enough to have stood through the events for which their sites are known. Bachman worked with a biodata sonification device built by Sam Cusumano, which converts a plant’s electrical activity into a control signal. Each track takes its name from a tree and a place, as in “White Oak, Fredericksburg Battlefield”, “Live Oak, Hampton University” and “Dogwood, Mountain Valley Pipeline Blast Zone”. At the core of every track is environmental audio from its site. At times he tuned his guitar to the tree’s output; at others he played recorded sound into the base of the tree through a contact speaker. He also turned historical texts into MIDI, among them writings by his grandmother, Mary Hostetler Oakey, a thread that leads back to the Hostetler line of *When the Roses Come Again*. [The Witness Tree by Daniel Bachman](https://danielbachman.bandcamp.com/album/the-witness-tree?ref=hwaelmag.com) On *The Witness Tree* it is often hard to say who, or what, is playing. None of this means the guitar has gone, however, and *Moving Through Light* (February 2025) is the plainest warning against reading these records as a straight line. It was built from a single guitar, stretched and layered, with nothing beside it except a drum machine app on a phone. Bachman can still make a record almost entirely from the guitar, though that is no longer his only way of working. RECORDS ON THE TRACE / 01 01 02 03 04 05 2018 · LPTLR126 · THREE LOBED *The Morning Star* "Invocation" lasts nearly nineteen minutes and features Forrest Marquisee on fiddle; Ian McColm is credited with harmonium, shruti box, transducer, bells and cymbals. Sessions took place in Petersburg, Fredericksburg, Staunton and Southampton County, and among Bachman's own instruments was a Bontempi organ. Sarah Bachman made the field recordings on "Song for the Setting Sun IV". 2021 · TLR129 · THREE LOBED *Axacan* The title recalls Ajacán, the Spanish Jesuit mission founded on the Chesapeake in September 1570, whose missionaries were killed in February 1571\. One proposed site for the mission lies near the village of Axacam, in present-day New Kent County. The double LP runs to about seventy-three minutes, and its centrepiece, "Blue Ocean 0", lasts more than seventeen. 2022 · LPTLR143 · THREE LOBED *Almanac Behind* The title is an anagram of Daniel Bachman. Recorded between January and July 2022, the album reached vinyl in February 2023\. Tyler Magill plays harmonium on eight tracks, and Chuck Johnson mastered the record. According to the notes, it can be played on a loop. 2023 · LPTLR149 · THREE LOBED *When the Roses Come Again* All fifteen titles come from a Carter Family song about life after death. Bachman plays a modified banjo, and the mouth bow shares the record with oscillator and drum apps on a phone. Tyler Magill contributes harmonium and handbells to three tracks. 2026 · DIGITAL · BANDCAMP *The Witness Tree* The album runs to nearly two hours and comes with a documentary film. The recordings are dated from 13 November 2024 to 24 June 2026, and the sites include Stratford Hall, Stoney Lonesome Cemetery at the Occoquan Workhouse and the Nottoway River. --- [Daniel Bachman is on bandcamp](https://danielbachman.bandcamp.com/music?ref=hwaelmag.com) --- Last revised: October 2026 ---