KURATED NO. 251
NEW RELEASE
Ipsa Corpora by Nathan Salsburg
Salsburg pitching his just-released album on Instagram.
Ipsa Corpora is Latin for “the bodies themselves”.
CONTENTS
- PLAYLIST: On Spotify and YouTube
Part 1 20:22 mins / Part 2 19.09 mins - INSTAGRAM: Salsburg’s blurb about the record (1:16 mins)
- KURATED No. 129: His pandemic project, Psalms, was an interpretation
of Hebrew songs he learned in summer camp - REVIEWS: No Depression, dustedmagazine
Salsburg’s latest album is a solo acoustic recording developed between the fall seasons of 2023 and 2024 and recorded in one day last December
AN INSTRUMENTAL LAMENT FOR GAZA
An eloquent musical reply to the barbarism of genocide
Guitarist Nathan Salsburg is a subtle, thinking musical force. His personal body of work over the last 15 years – along with many collaborations – displays a considered, sure-fingered approach. The musicianship is informed by integrity and a voluminous knowledge of song – especially folk and acoustic blues. For 24 years he managed the Alan Lomax Archive of field recordings. He left the project last October following intractable differences over ethical concerns.
His latest work, Ipsa Corpora is a two-part, 39-minute set prompted by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and what’s followed. The phrase “Ipsa Corpora” means “the bodies themselves” in Latin. In the album’s liner notes he writes: “As the world began to watch, with a crushing technological capacity for bearing witness, bodies instrumentalized—desecrated, barbarized, destroyed—for political, ideological, and eschatological ends, I relied on this expanding composition as an outlet for my grief and sputtering, impotent rage. It felt like a kind of ritual mourning device.”
Developed over a year, the music is often punctuated by silence as if Salsburg was pausing to contemplate what comes next. The process was fraught and disrupted.
He writes: “The first fragments of what became “Ipsa Corpora” arrived in a torrent, overwhelming my abilities to keep them straight. I thought that imagining them as individuals, like characters in a play, could be a useful mnemonic, so I tried assigning an identity to each, poaching from gauzy memories of long-dead relatives.
“These arbitrary associations failed. The new pieces couldn’t correspond to the old apparitions. They were real — subjects in themselves, paradoxically, synesthetically, embodied in sound.
“I wasn’t happy with this conclusion but I couldn’t shake it, and as more pieces of the eventual whole revealed themselves over the following months, the effect became like guests arriving: like physical visitation, when the air in a room is ruffled and displaced as a body moves into and through it.”
He came to see the compositions as “a site for meditation on the seams of relation between individuals, in flesh or sound…the silences in the piece multiplied, each insisting on its own singularity.”
Superb musician respecting thoughtful Judaism
Salsburg’s articulate musings contain some heady stuff. You might wonder if the weight of his grief delivers a dour and solemn musical document. Fortunately, no. The resonant solo acoustic play of Ipsa Corpora has various movements – some are ponderous and spare; others follow the silent pauses with light, lively finger-picking.
The Kentucky-based Salsburg is like millions of us who feel the tragedy and futility of the Gaza war – and others – and do our best to carry on. He’s been making beautiful music for years and is active in his community. He raises a daughter with his wife and partner Joan Shelley. His circle of musical colleagues include Shelley, Canada’s The Weather Station, James Elkington, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) and Jake Xerxes Fussell.
As a practicing Jew, he opposes Israel’s “catastrophic war of vengeance” adding that “ethnonationalism [is] fundamentally at odds with the spirit and practice of the Judaism I have aspired to inhabit and be guided by as an adult.”
In these disrupted and senseless times rage and resistance stride alongside the search for hope and meaning. Salsburg’s composition is an eloquent and emotional musical reply to the barbarism of genocide. Dusted magazine music writer Jennifer Kelly says it well:
“Ipsa Corpora flows effortlessly from one musical idea to the next, some rustic, some mystic, some plain and some elaborated with filigrees. It’s all played beautifully, each note clear and meaningful, no muddle or murk, and imbued with grace. You have to clear a 40-minute space for it, but that’s a small consideration for music this light and lovely. In a world full of an endless, worthless flotsam of things, here is the thing itself, and it’s gorgeous.”
28 June 2025
PLAYLISTS
On Spotify
On YouTube
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG-pRIXeCU7cmVVsAPgr53wdFWGYK-Jx1
