Like I've mentioned before, I'm not the biggest fan of the whole contemporary psych/freak folk scene, but Timothy Renner's various projects and his Dark Holler label is one of the exceptions. I discovered his label and the bands Stone Breath and Moth Masque several years ago by accident, after stumbling across his website and finding that this label that specialized in obscure, dark folk music was located right over in southern Pennsylvania, not all that far from where we're based in Hagerstown. I was fascinated by all of the music that I heard from the label, but his band Stone Breath will always be one of my favorites.

Performing as a duo with his wife Alison (who had also played with him in the psych-folk band Mourning Cloak), Renner's music in Stone Breath is both ancient sounding and quite psychedelic, blending together improvised acoustic percussion and strange primitive drone jams with ethereal acid-folk and a sort of skeletal bluegrass that was marked by the presence of Timothy's plunking banjo and his hushed, almost-whispered vocals. Stone Breath's music was creepy and dark, and a bit weird as the musicians create tiny symphonies of creaking, clanking beauty with acoustic guitars, banjo, bells, harp, tambourine, field recordings of running water, crows and owls, mandolin, zither, sheet metal, tibetan bells, hand percussion, chimes and other instruments, each song drifting like delicate cobwebs

and evoking images of dark, shadowy woodlands, long-forgotten graveyards out in the country covered over by weeds and vines, fields of wildflowers and crumbling churches, and animal bones scattered beneath ancient oak trees. Gorgeous and ghostly, their songs are like hearing an Appalachian version of Syd Barrett, or Current 93 playing in the dark corners of a crumbling churchyard somewhere in the countryside of rural Maryland (where this album was recorded in the mid 90's). I'm reminded of older, occultic psych-folk projects like Comus, Incredible String Band, and Pearls Before Swine as well as the hypnotic music of Japan's Ghost, and anyone into these groups should certainly check out the spectral, witchy backwoods folkdrift of Stone Breath.

Songs Of Moonlight And Rain was the duo's first album and first came out in 1997 and had been out of print for several years. Hand/Eye (the experimental imprint of Renner's Dark Holler label) reissued the album for it's 10-year anniversary and included an additional nine tracks, taken from other releases from the same period including Stone Breath's Strange Familiars 7", a collaboration with Fit & Limo, and earlier recordings. The disc is packaged in a foldout card wallet similiar to the packaging that Renner used for his Crow Tongue releases, and it includes lengthy, deeply personal liner notes from Renner and complete lyrics.