100 favourite songs: #77: "Dance Of Sulphur" - Scout Niblett

One who’s certainly in it for the creation is Emma Louise Niblett, adopting ‘Scout’ in honour of the (wideeyedwisewonderful) character in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. The music she makes is extraordinarily sparse, stripped-back, and bare, but by no means barren — rather, it is stark with a luminous vividness which only the aching space between notes can give rise to. Sweet Heart Fever was her first album, and it’s a thing of wonder. - 9/1/04

I’ve always felt that there was something profound about the gaps between the music in this song, a sort of ache that sound is inadequate to express, but which can be gestured at by the silence that falls between the notes. There’s also something very spiritual about the song…it’s resignedly fatalistic and yet somehow hopeful (“and my healer said it was meant to be; he’d have my smile…”) and makes me think of magic done in smoky tents, and rebirth, and lost, wandering people, and they’re all alone and looking for something they can’t quite name, and one of them, just for a second there, caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye… - 30/1/04

I guess that this is folk music of a sorts, and I do hear something of the Appalachias in its lonely uneven wavering strum and pluck, but “Dance of Sulphur” really seems to inhabit a space all its own. There are a few songs which I think feel genuinely out of time, and this is one of them.