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“For me, classical composition is a very humble thing,” says Ari Picker, founder of Lost in the Trees, a musical collective from Chapel Hill, North Carolina recently signed to ANTI Records. “I'm no expert, by any means, but I am blown away by orchestral music. Ideas that are stale or old hat to classical people are still pretty magical to me. All I want is to take a pinch of that brilliance, and put it into what I do.”Picker, a composer by training and a songwriter by inclination, describes his band as "Orchestral Folk Music" because it features arrangements which harness both the dramatic power of classical music and the more intimate sounds of the singer-songwriter tradition – strings and brass meshing effortlessly with accordion, bells, musical saw, banjo, and mandolin. The group’s Antidebut, All Alone In An Empty House was co-produced by Scott Solter (St. Vincent, Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, Erik Friedlander) who creates a space in which both varieties of music co-exist with stirring results. The dramatic and symphonic elements of classical music merge with the accessibility of American folk and pop to create a sound both grandiose and intensely personal.
The album is equally striking for the consistency of its lyrical content. Picker’s songs are about how family life intertwines with a creative life – and how such generative states of being are rife with emotions that are amorphous, inspiring and painful all at once. Spaces, places, and people are left barren and devoid of life—fires consume, babies die young. But the flipside of this creative destruction reveals itself when Picker’s characters and settings are left ripe with potential—a painter takes a walk in the woods, empty rooms wait to be filled. The album becomes all the more powerful when you discover its subject matter is literal in unexpected ways.
Picker returns again and again to these memories, transmuting them into images that serve as
both facts and symbols–blurring the line between plain confession and furtive metaphor, coming
of age story and spirit quest. In this way, the album recalls the mysterious power of indie rock touchstones (Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Arcade Fire’s Funeral) and older records from the Golden Age of the singer-songwriter (Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue).
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