Trinity Thirty [LP]

Trinity Thirty is a reinterpretation of the beloved Cowboy Junkies classic The Trinity Session, on the occasion of the album's 30th anniversary. Berlin-based Canadian producers Deadbeat and Fatima Camara bonded over a shared love of this iconic album (and their shared small-town Ontario roots) and embarked on their first-ever collaboration. The Trinity Session is legendary for it's naturalistic, languorous covers of classic tunes and traditional work songs - and for being recorded with a single microphone in single takes at a church in Toronto. While Deadbeat and Camara couldn't entirely replicate this approach as a duo, they similarly re-recorded everything with single mics in a big open space at Berlin's Chez Cherie studio, relying heavily on natural room acoustics, committed to raw first takes, guided by an overriding strategy of slowing down the tempos as far as they could while continuing to channel the warm asceticism of the original album. The result is a gorgeously somnambulant acoustic-meets-electronic collection of 'covers of covers', where the reference point is always the Junkies' original approach, stretched to new and beguiling limits of deceleration and dubby narcotized spaciousness - a sensibility further reinforced by the mastering treatment of minimalist dub-techno legend Stefan Betke (-scape, Pole).