David Eugene Edwards released his first-ever solo album under his own name today, entitled  Hyacinth.  The album is available to purchase HERE. He has always been larger than life. His atemporal style and powerfully iconoclast presence make him seem a man somehow beyond us. His music with innovative heavy droning folk band Wovenhand, and before that the haunting revivification of high lonesome sound antique Americana of 16 Horsepower breathed a near-apocalyptic sense of urgency and poignance into musical archetypes long abandoned in the latter-20th Century. Anyone who has seen him perform live will attest to his captivating intensity as he sings and coaxes sweeping, dark fury and beauty from his instrument. 

Now, on his first-ever solo album under his own name, Edwards delivers a sound uniquely his own, with a vulnerability and introspection unheard from him before. Stripping back the heavy rock of his recent work with Wovenhand, Hyacinth puts the man’s voice, and sparing instrumentation into the main focus. There’s a somber beauty and world-weary tone throughout these songs. The album could be considered a slight return to the more melodic sounds of 16 Horsepower’s Secret South (2000) and the first, self-titled  Wovenhand album (2002). But there’s more going on here: a rhythmic, pulsating undercurrent reminiscent of the tape loops and rudimentary rhythms of 80s Industrial post-punk as well as 808 Drill Style beats. The overall effect is often as if we’re hearing the clock ticking away our own mortality.

“Hyacinth was a sort of vision,“ Edwards says. “A dream. I sought out of my old wooden banjo and nylon string guitar a hidden path. Secrets they had kept from me within themselves all these years, and created a new Mythos to myself of philosophical and spiritual ideas or concepts.” From the outset of the pandemic, Edwards spent considerable time in solitary isolation, sick and impacted very hard in every way. Once he’d harnessed the music within, he enlisted multi-instrumentalist and producer Ben Chisholm (The Armed, Chelsea Wolfe, Converge, Genghis Tron) to help him realize the album’s recording and mix. 

“Overall, I guess the album is a weaving of narratives ancient and modern, of humankind’s search for understanding of this world we find ourselves in and of each other. In all its simplicity and complexity,” Edwards says. “Hyacinth is a reference to the Greek myth of Apollo. And, the word meaning a precious stone and blue larkspur flower of purple and pall.” 

David Eugene Edwards is currently on tour in the EU & UK. See dates below. US tour dates to be announced soon.

DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS EUROPEAN TOUR 2023 

Sept 29 Auditorium du Conservatoire de Lille – Lille FR

Sept 30 De Roma – Antwerp BE

Oct 01 Place La Laiterie – Strasbourg FR

Oct 02 L’Usine – Geneva CH

Oct 04 BIKO – Milano IT 

Oct 05 Casa del Popolo Il Progresso – Florence IT 

Oct 06 Locomotiv – Bologna IT

Oct 09 De Spot – Middelburg NL 

Oct 10 Tolhuistuin – Amsterdam NL 

Oct 12 Train – Århus DK

Oct 13 Amager Bio – Copenhagen DK 

Oct 14 Mejeriet – Lund SE 

Oct 15 Nefertiti – Gothenburg SE 

Oct 17 Kulturkirken Jakob – Oslo NO 

Oct 18 Kulturhuset – Bergen NO 

Oct 19 Folken – Stavanger NO

Oct 20 Gamla – Kristiansand NO 

Oct 23 OSLO – London UK