Beacon artist releases two albums in two weeks
Tamalyn Miller embodies her name: The centuries-old Scottish ballad “Tam-Lin” has fairies, horses, mysticism, herbal medicine and a symbolic rose — all among Miller’s many obsessions.
Those fixations compel her to create meticulous music and visual art. In the past two weeks, she has released two albums.
“When I’m working, I’m in a trance,” she says. “It has to be perfect, so I put my everything into it, but I don’t know why.”
Miller also assembled elaborate books of poetry by hand, down to the lace bows. Other through-lines include death, gloves, vintage dresses, old clock radios, Greek mythology and Russian literature.
After living in Manhattan for 25 years, Miller responded to a friend’s suggestion to apply for artist housing in Beacon and came to the city sight unseen in February 2020.
A deep connection with plants and the natural world is reflected in her solo album, Ghost Pipe. Her primary instrument is a handmade, one-string horsehair violin. She also crafted a rose-branch flute, thorns included.
Ghost Pipe is the product of countless hours tinkering in a closet she converted to a recording booth. The layered tracks, which she calls “chamber ambient” music, convey a trippy, alternative dimension.
Notes linger to create a mood. Sound effects drift in and out. Someone speaks in Italian. Whooshing and whispering noises lope along. Patterns emerge, such as the bass and vocals in “These Flowers,” which echoes a medieval children’s round.
“Come Into the Garden” rests on the haunting, metaphoric lyric, “They come to me when walking, these flowers are talking/They come to me when dreaming, these flowers are screaming.”
The credits list around 25 instruments, most of which are “wounded,” Miller says, meaning they are “broken, from a thrift store or cost $5 at a yard sale. The banjo only has two strings. They tell me what they want to say.”
Miller says that, without musical training, she “had no idea what was going to come out. I’d never recorded an album or written a song, but this is my pandemic project, and I got 75 minutes out of it.”
She completed the ethereal, experimental soundscapes of another new release, Distract’d by a Kaleidoscope Salesman, with collaborator Stephen Spera, who lives in Saugerties. They call themselves Spirit Radio. She sang and played the horsehair fiddle; he did everything else, except for cello drones by Arthur Merwyn.
Taking her obsession with nature and music to a physical level, Miller will lead sessions of Listening with Plants on Sept. 13 and Sept. 15 at Long Dock Park in Beacon. “It’s part artist walk, part nature walk, part collective listening experience,” she says.
Now that the albums are complete, Miller says her “mind is percolating. I just flit from project to project; I’m not good at strategizing. I hope somebody will like my work and am ever optimistic that I find people who appreciate what I do, but I make everything for me.”
To register for Listening with Plants, contact Miller through tamalynmiller.com/info. The site links to her albums and has information about her art, books and poetry.
