Sparse, beautiful folk-influenced music shaped by winter, tragedy, and nature.
Flutes & Low comprises Ben Pichler and Cambria Haen, who met in Duluth, north-eastern Minnesota. They took their name from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Inversnaid”, which paints a vivid description of wild, untamed nature, particularly a dark, fast‑flowing Scottish burn. Appropriately, the cover photo is of a waterfall on the Lester River in Minnesota, and many of the lyrics reference nature’s power and wildness.
Their folk-centric debut album was self-produced and recorded in their Minneapolis apartment. At first, the duo were concerned about the sounds from the outside world leaking into their recordings; however, they embraced the creaking floorboards of their flat and the rhythmic buzzing of the cicada insects outside. These quirks add to the charm, as well as the pastoral and poetic nature of this record.
There’s a cinematic nature and film-score quality to many of the compositions. There are also shades of Iron and Wine, as well as Bon Iver. The opening track, Sifting, has a melancholy, haunting feel to it. The story is told from the perspective of a lonely miner during the nineteenth‑century Californian gold rush, and its sense of desolation is heightened by Aaron Fabbrini’s atmospheric pedal steel part. The introduction to Long Winter lifts its chords from Fred Neil’s Dolphins but progresses from there into something new and different. The Midwest of the USA has a long, brutal hibernal season, and these extended periods of cold and darkness have, to a certain extent, informed much of the music on this record, as Long Winter demonstrates.
Armistice is “told through the lens of a couple in the midst of a trial.” Home appears to be safe, but ultimately a fragile and broken place. In August 2025, a mass shooting occurred at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, less than three miles from where Pichler lived. Two school children were killed. The band drew from the tragedy, creating the seven-and-a-half-minute song Requiem in B Minor, saying that “In such a macabre style and tragic story, we wanted to do our best to give a glimmer of hope even in the darkness of the subject matter. This is why we wanted the refrain to touch on a source of peace everyone can hope for: ‘I’m home’.” The music features a lugubrious melody played on the violin by Jasmine Holt as Pichler sings that the “Devil is on the prowl.”
The album closes with Vespera. It sounds solemn and beautiful, creating a liturgical atmosphere. This is an album where moments of joy are intertwined with wistfulness and struggle. It’s sparse but beautifully arranged, and yet there’s much depth to be found here.
