James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg - The Queue Outside The Night Ministry

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg: Believer Field by Nathan Salsburg
From "Avos," released on Tompkins Square in August, 2011. Recorded and mixed by Jonathan Schenke at Soungs, Chicago; mastered by Blaise Barton, Scientific Mastering, Chicago.

James Elkington moved from London to Chicago around the turn of the millennium and has since released a string of albums as leader of The Zincs for Thrill Jockey Records. After dissolving the band in 2008, Elkington has concentrated on acoustic, folk-tinged music with his band The Horse's Ha (that he shares with Freakwater's Janet Bean), culminating in the release of their debut album, "Of The Cathmawr Yards" in 2009. He is also the owner/operator of a clunky solo career, and moonlights convincingly as the guitar player in Jon Langford's (of The Mekons) Skull Orchard.

Nathan Salsburg - Sought & Hidden

Back Home In Bogenbrook by Nathan Salsburg
From "Affirmed," forthcoming on the No Quarter label, November 15, 2011. Recorded in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Funeral Home by Kevin Ratterman; mixed and mastered by Blaise Barton at Scientific Mastering in Chicago.

Nathan Salsburg was born in that Diamond City, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—she of anthracite glimmer and Babe Ruth's 1926 long ball—and is a longtime resident of Louisville, Kentucky. He is a folklorist and a producer and presenter of traditional music for East Village Radio, the Drag City imprint Twos & Fews, and the Alan Lomax Archive, among other outlets. His first solo record is called Affirmed, and it's about race horses—Affirmed, Bold Ruler, and Eight Belles, specifically—and desire and reckonings of the spirit. It's an almost entirely instrumental affair, save his elegiac rendering of the traditional tune "The False True Love."

—An excerpt from M.C. Taylor's notes for "Affirmed"