☼ ☼ ☼ Tim Eriksen w/Peter Irvine | Nelson Town Hall | Friday, September 11, 2026
The Monadnock Folklore Society is excited to Welcome back Tim Eriksen & Peter Irvine for a concert at the Nelson Town Hall on Friday, September 11 at 7:30 PM. Admission is $25/$20(in advance). Children under 16 are admitted free with paying adult.
Tim Eriksen is an acclaimed singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, banjo, fiddle, bajo sexto, kaval, bansuri) from Amherst, Massachusetts. He is known for transforming American tradition with his startling interpretations of old ballads, love songs, shape-note gospel and dance tunes from New England and Southern Appalachia. He combines hair-raising vocals with inventive accompaniment on banjo, fiddle, guitar and bajo sexto – a twelve string Mexican acoustic bass – creating a distinctive hardcore Americana sound.
Peter Irvine is a founding member of legendary band Cordelia’s Dad. When he’s not playing drums and percussion or teaching, Peter runs his his successful Entertainment Law practice in Northampton, MA.
On their new album ‘Absence and her sister’ Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine return to their roots in folk minimalism and gothic Americana- new and ancient songs of their native New England informed by the wide palette of their other collaborations. The two are probably best known for their musical contributions to films including the Oscar-winning Cold Mountain and cult horror phenomenon The Outwaters, and as founding members of the anomalous folk-noise outfit Cordelia’s Dad, “the only band to have performed with both Doc Watson and Nirvana.” But while echoes of punk-folk and “shapenote” music abound on Absence and her sister, so does the dissonance and rhythmic complexity of their Bosnian band Žabe I Babe, the deep groove they picked up from collaborators like banjo master Dwight Diller and East African gospel singers the Naamaara sisters, and the love of experimentation and power of repetition celebrated in Terry Riley’s “In C,” the first piece the two ever played together as teenagers.
This promises to be a night you won’t easily forget. One listener describes one of their concerts as sounding “like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My son, the Ursula Le Guin fan, thinks they sound like a pair of bards from one of the more remote islands in Earthsea. I leave their shows with my senses fully activated in a way that rarely happens at my age.” Dr. Ethan Hein – ‘Ethan teaches you music’
“One of the best singers in music”
-T Bone Burnett
“otherworldly”
-Barbara Kingsolver