If you head north on I-85 from Hillsborough, NC, and take the exit for 58 East, in fifteen minutes you'll reach Diamond Grove, a small unincorporated area in Brunswick County, Virginia on the Meherrin River. To most eyes, there's not much there-you'll have to drive to Lawrenceville for groceries or to South Hill for hardware.

But hidden in this patch of Virginia piedmont are the remnants of a dairy farm established in the 1740s, its main house an old two up, two down beauty still outfitted with rope beds and all. Go there today and you'll hear distant sounds of someone working soybeans and cotton in the leased-out outbuildings, farm-use tires grinding gravel roads, frogs peeping, and chickadees singing out: chick-a-dee, chick-a-dee.

But if you happened to pass through in September of 2023, you might've heard fiddle tunes ricocheting off the pines, BBs rattling-to-rest inside empties, and the sounds of Weirs recording their second LP and Dear Life Records debut: Diamond Grove.

Weirs is an experimental collective grown out of central North Carolina's music scene--one that is equal parts old-time and DIY noise. Non-hierarchical in form, past Weirs performances have included anywhere from two to twelve people.

In September 2023, nine traveled up US-58 to pack into the living and dining rooms of the dairy farm main house, still in the family of band member and organizer Oliver Child-Lanning, whose relatives have been there for centuries.

This Weirs lineup-neither definitive nor precious-includes Child-Lanning; Justin Morris and Libby Rodenbough (his collaborators in Sluice); Evan Morgan, Courtney Werner, and Mike DeVito of Magic Tuber Stringband; and stalwarts Andy McLeod, Alli Rogers, and Oriana Messer who played deep into those late-summer evenings. What resulted are the nine tracks of Diamond Grove, recorded with an ad hoc signal chain assembled from a greater-community's worth of borrowed gear.

The Weirs project began as tape experiments on traditional tunes Child-Lanning made under the name Pluviôse in winter 2019. This evolved into the first Weirs record, Prepare to Meet God, which was self-released in July 2020 and was a collaboration between Child-Lanning and Morris during COVID.

The strange conditions of that debut—a communal tradition of live songs recorded apart in isolation-are undone by Diamond Grove, a record rooted in the unrepeatable convergence of people, place, and time. On the new record, Weirs continue their search for how best to forward, uphold, and unshackle so-called "traditional" music. They are songcatchers, gathering tunes on the verge of obscure death.

Their wild, centuries-spanning repertoire plays like an avant-call-the-tune session—a kind of Real Book for a scene fluent in porch jams, Big Blood, Amps for Christ, and Jean Ritchie. Weirs catch songs whose interpretive canon still feels ajar-open enough to stand next to but never above those who've sung them before.

These aren't attempts at definitive versions. The recordings on Diamond Grove feel like visitations rather than revisions. And the question Weirs asks on this record is not how to simply continue the tradition of their forebears, but how traditional music could sound today.

For Weirs, the history of this tradition could be taken less from the folk revival than from musique concrète; less from pristine old master recordings than something like The Shadow Ring if they'd come from the evangelical South. Diamond Grove, in these ways, is history. It is a place. It is time. It is songcatching, liveness, tape manipulation.

Like the low-head dam that the word weir implies, it is a defense against the current. It is a defense of regional lexicons against mass-produced vernaculars; a defense against the belief that we can simply return to a simpler time; a defense against the idea that folk music must remain "pure"; a defense against the claim that a dream of the future latent in lost histories is irretrievably lost.

Against all that, Diamond Grove defends traditional music by making it sound like the complexity of today-because it knows that such music, and all the histories caught up in it, has a role to play in the days to come.

Tracklisting:
Side A
1. I Want to Die Easy
2. Lord Randall
3. Everlasting
4. Edward
5. Doxology (I)

Side B
6. (A Still, Small Voice)
7. Lord Bateman
8. Doxology (Il)

Dear Life Records

Weirs 'Diamond Grove'

MJ Lenderman 'MJ Lenderman'

MJ Lenderman 'Ghost of Your Guitar Solo'

MJ Lenderman 'Boat Songs'

Natalie Jane Hill 'Hopeful Woman'