We've written about Laurel Premo before. Five years ago, for her track The Brushy Fork of Johns Creek, we produced a video that served as an introduction to her body of work. Laurel Premo is known for her transformational delivery of traditional roots music, with a focus on complex rhythm and spiritual connection. As teacher, archivist, historian, and musical artist, her solo performances harness the primal energy of harmonic drones, minimalist repetition, and rich polyrhythm. Premo fully leans in to the archaic melodies and in-between intonations that connect folk sounds to the mystic and unknown.

For her latest project "Laments," Premo presents four pieces of griefwork, delivered through solo voice and fiddle and rooted in the functional music of lamentation. This music feels so grounded in the past that it serves as a conduit between pages of humanity, connecting our modern existence to the time-honored stories of our ancestors, and the tradition of folk music that has always been so deeply intertwined with daily life. These songs sing the tension and gravity of intimacy, of reciprocity, of relation, and of surrender–through sacred raw sounds that invoke the listener to enter into feeling.

We were very happy to hear about Primo's follow up to her third solar release "Golden Loam" (2021), and Primo was gracious enough to answer a few of the questions we had around her artistic process and her personal sources of inspiration.

Q and A with Laurel Premo

1 - Can you give me a little historical context for your connection with archaic folk music? Would you say that it is driven by your roots in Michigan, or more of an academic fascination with traditional music, or something else entirely?

I would say it’s a combination of all of these paths, and simply what my body has pulled me into. In participating in and then studying and researching folk music, I’ve always been magnetically drawn into sounds and forms that made me feel alive, things that sensorially woke deeper or older parts of me. Sometimes that’s been in “archaic” intonation that rattles more harmonics in the air than the cleaned up version we most commonly use today in the west, sometimes that’s in melodies or rhythms that act as minimalistic puzzles and draw me into a different level of being, and sometimes that’s been where music and folk culture overlap in ritual and art and the deep spiritual significance that I feel in layering intricate upon intricate layers of sound, movement, stitches, prayer. This has become a significant lens through which I interact with the world because there is endless growth and relationship for me there.

I grew up learning and participating in fiddle, dance, and singing with family in my home in the rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Through their community and many visiting musicians, I had significant introductions to many folk traditions growing up. For my undergraduate degree, I studied music and art through a technological lens, but made visits to folk academies in other countries to continue my traditions education. Today, my career feels like a continuation of that joy and labor in research, improvisation, craft, practice, teaching, and medicinal offerings.

Studying music and folk culture in countries outside of America, namely Finland and Norway, was instrumental in me finding again my passion and deep connections within the practice, craft, and simply the use of music. For Americans like me who largely have our ancestry from immigrants, there is a disconnection from the home culture and land that our oldest folk traditions have lived on, been stored in, for centuries. Some things get lost, and have to be found again to be remembered and woken up in your blood.

2 - From a technical perspective, can you describe your writing process? Do you start by choosing a modal tonality, or does that emerge organically from an improvisational approach?

I’m never thinking too technically about music, unless I need to communicate it to collaborators. I’m not typically knowing the names of notes or chords that are happening in my hands and throat unless I necessarily need to name them to remember them. So, for me, my practice of traditional music leads to muscle memory of certain modal tonalities, and then in my writing I let that come through naturally without putting too many limits on it (other than my taste and a sense of reverence), and let them combine to make a syncretic sound from my various roots and life experience.

3 - Regarding ‘Laments,’ I am fascinated by the statement you made, that these songs are ‘not themselves live grief ritual work, but prepared compositions that echo sounds found by the maker performing such rites on herself.’ Can you expand on that a little bit? Are there any elements of these rites that you can describe in more detail?

I wanted to make that delineation there out of respect to the traditional art form of lamentation, or ‘performative ritualized mourning’ as it’s labeled academically as a cross-cultural phenomenon. The tracks on the record are not me doing ‘lamenting’ in that I’m not actively improvising / channeling / leading a physical rite of passage live. As I write this though, I guess I see how very close what I created for this project is to that description, especially inside of the modern world of distance communication – even though they are prepared compositions, they seek to serve that same purpose. In the end ‘Laments’ was still the most honest title for what I created. These are sounds that came from me moving through those sort of sound-making-rites in my own grief – spontaneously pulling, tugging my way towards understanding and re-connection in times of need.

I’m no expert on traditional lamentation, but I do know from my research into Karelian and Irish/Scottish forms that there are set melodic and lyrical ‘libraries,’ or maybe more clearly - commonly used meters, shapes of melodies, or ways of coding language that are drawn on during the most traditional forms of this practice. I can see that in trying to separate my “prepared” pieces from what I just listed that the line isn’t very clear - thanks for walking with me through the grey area there.

Perhaps I wanted to mark the difference between the two - “live” vs “prepared,” out of my respect and participation in ritual and ceremony in my life. Some things can be recorded, some things cannot. After this music was born, it drew me back to research traditional lamentation - an idea that had been planted as a small seed that had been greatly inspiring to me in my undergraduate studies. For a decade or so I have held the possibility of, roughly, that role as a guide into or through feeling at the core of my work. It wasn’t until the middle of the last few years when I had been writing this music on fiddle and voice, wailing music with few words, that I realized I was working with actual lament, and I found myself knee deep in a river of tradition as opposed to just being inspired by it. So I am here, coming full circle. Outside of this recorded work, after these songs opened me, my path has led me to offer private grief ritual for my community, which includes my working in the ‘alive’ version of performative ritualized mourning alongside other sonic and kinetic practices of trance. I mark the difference between these two (live sounding vs prepared/recorded song) out of reverence for and relationship with both.

4 - Are there any elders or mentors that you would like to acknowledge as having contributed to your evolution as an artist?

Thank you for the opportunity. Some tradition bearers and folk music scholars that I’m honored to have spent many hours with include Arto Järvelä, Ånon Egeland, Joel Mabus, and Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti, with some very important single lessons from Gerry O’Beirne, Mark Dvorak, Sally Van Meter, and Bruce Molsky. I want to acknowledge my parents, too, for putting instruments in my hands and giving me my first lessons in any of this. In a bigger way, everyone who I’ve interacted with in folk culture has been a part of my education – the elders I danced with in Finnish farm halls as a little girl, the quilters and artisans filling my eyes with visual code, my grandmother nourishing my belly with kitchen craft. The whole community is an education, the whole community goes into each person. I am part of a whole, and represent the gifts of all of them.

5 - if you were given the opportunity to collaborate with anyone, living or dead, who would you choose, and why?

I would simply love the chance to have a conversation as an adult with my grandparents. Sure, we could play or chat about history or music, but mostly I’d just like to talk together, and see how far the dreams reach in both directions.

Visit Laurel Premo online or on Instagram.

Cover photo by Harpe Star.