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With exhausting supplication wrung like the King James of Ecclesiastes, David Eugene Edwards of Sixteen Horsepower with band mates Daniel McMahon (on organ and mandolin) and Ordy Garrison (former Slim Cessna¹s Auto Club member on drums) closed the Gallery stage at the outdoor Cornerstone Festival 2002 in fever-filled waves of southern gothic sound and imagery.

As the three piece ensemble mounted the stage and began, their descending, dissonant, pensive melodies gave a sense the space around was shrinking like a roadside revival tent with no place to hide. As with Sixteen Horsepower, Edwards¹ vocal influence and lyricism gives one a feeling verging on the voyeurism of his inner workings until his changed voicings, done by switching from dry to effected mics, jars one into internalization. In the urgency of "My Russia," Edwards' vocals sweltered achingingly with the lyrics 'hide me in your hand/with the mother of my children/where the land sinks deep in its color/bless the ground where we kneel/safe in your woven creel/we follow for you speak/you speak as no other." An example of the sense of location as well as time lost was the piece "Glass Eye" in which Edwards¹ poetry speaks with a paternal authority that closes in upon the repair of conscience. "I get behind myself/grieved in my spirit by my hands/seems he has turned his head/this collector of useless clutter/somethin¹ now has caught his eye/now his words only stumble out in stutters."

The lyric driven dynamics also oozed with the musical empathy of Edwards band mates, McMahon and Garrison, as their instrumental input hastened the poet¹s intensity. McMahon¹s organ pressed into the childhood discomfort of being locked into a church pew and his mandolin was hitched with tenuous, pendantic crispness. Garrison¹s minimal, Salvation Army band backbone equally haunted the concert¹s the arrangements as the undone tunings stretched deeply into the south¹s Celtic roots. Edwards¹ captivating intensity closed the evening with a piercing encore rendition of Sixteen Horsepower¹s "Golden Rope" from the album Low Estate.

Where Sixteen Horsepower performances have been the combustion of storytelling, Woven Hand¹s was the tapestry of a spiritual journey through the rolling landscapes of raised burning petitions. Where the two ensembles have equaled is presented in the intensity of all that is to be David Eugene Edwards. His portrayal of himself through music is what could be described as a deep south, David Lynch version of St. John¹s dark night of the soul. In that last chance roadside revival tent, Woven Hand had the musical tenacity to mix brimstone with treacle, and left within spinning, stirring echoes.

Jessica Walker 7/11/2002