Best Video Film & Cultural Center features the triple bill of Mother Juniper, Nathan El (Pittsburgh, PA), and Offering Field. (All the Pretty Horses, originallty scheduled to be part of this show, had to drop off the bill.) The show starts at 7 PM and the cover is $10.

Mother Juniper is made up of dream story weavers, many myths, and a three stringed street banjo.

Nathan El is the experimental folk project of Pittsburgh-based agriculturalist and musician Nathan Blake. The project seeks to stretch traditional folk forms into unfamiliar shapes and marry sleepy folk with ambient, distorted textures. Live, Nathan El is often supported by Claire Sweeney (fiddle, harmonium, backing vocals), Austin Orth (guitar, keys, backing vocals), Brian Spragg (drums), and Carson Mara (bass).  

Nathan El has independently toured the East Coast, received airplay on NPR, and opened for internationally touring acts. The project’s most exemplary release to date, reworkings of the traditional songs Jubilee and Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, arrives Friday, May 29.

New Haven’s Offering Field—Adam Parker's stage name—steps out of the studio and into the midwinter dusk with a gift: a new album of mystic songwriting crisp as frost on the fallen leaves. Hand Reaching Through Flames, his first album in seven years, is the most intimate work Parker has released, having both the immediacy of small club performance and the uncanny quality of a voice picked up on a shortwave radio.

Parker paints fluid shapes with his palate of acoustic guitar, bass, shimmering percussion, and Mellotron around delicate lyrics steeped in magic and longing. We’re led down winding paths to windows, mirrors, eyes: thresholds that beckon us somewhere within and beyond — into the night sky and back into the basement. Producer Sam Carlson renders these songs in a detailed chiaroscuro. Each strum rings out like a beam of light through dusty air in a home emptied and moved away from. Adam’s voice cuts through the veil and echoes down the hall.