Great Lake Swimmers + Meg Baird

A Forest Of Arms is the sixth album from Tony Dekker’s Great Lake Swimmers and the follow up to 2012’s New Wild Everywhere. With a surging rhythm section, razor sharp violin, banjo and guitars and flourishing, Dekker and band mates have pushed their sound significantly, creating some of their most dynamic songs ever recorded.

Those familiar with the decade-long output or Great Lake Swimmers will recognise the thematic threads of beauty in the natural world, environmental issues and explorations or close personal ties that hold us together. The familiar versus the strange theme is ook running through this record, both in the instrumentation and in the songwriting.

A Forest Of Arms was recorded in several at locations over the span of several at months, covering extensiveness new territory while remaining true to the group’s refined sound. One of the unique and unusual locations was Tyendinaga Cavern and Caves in Tyendinaga, Ontario, where a number of the vocal and acoustic guitar tracks-including the main parts for Do not Leave Me Hanging, The Great Bear and With Every Departure were recorded amid haunting acoustics, stalactites and circling bats.

The violins were recorded at the Heliconian Club of Toronto, while the bass and drum tracks were largely recorded at the Chalet Studio just outside of Toronto, a unique chalet-style recording space located on 40 acres of rolling hills and trails, in proximity to the shores of Lake Ontario. The pastoral and elemental nature of these spaces surfaces throughout the album.

Support comes from Meg Baird. Baird co-founded and recorded three albums with Espers – one of the most distinctively mysterious acts of the century’s first decade. She recorded two solo LPs for Drag City: Dear Companion and Seasons on Earth. She has collaborated with Will Oldham, Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten and Steve Gunn.

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