Frank's Corner #21: In Conversation With Black Brunswicker
Recording on tape, philosophies and processes of layering, and landscape portraiture illustrated by sound.
Hi hi everybody - welcome back to the corner. If you’ll allow me, I want to quickly say a huge thank you for all the readership and kind reception lately. Your reposts, likes, messages, follows, what have you do NOT go unnoticed. Alright, enough with all that, we have a really awesome one on deck this week. As you might have come to realize, I am a sucker for a long, wafty, instrumental or drone collection, so I was super excited to have the opportuniuty to sit with a pretty fantasitc new one in preparation for this chat.
Etta Helfrich, who creates and performs under the moniker Black Brunswicker, has cracked the code of painting landscapes with sound and instrument. Currently based in Manchester but born in Bloomington, Indiana, there is a vastness to the atmospheres, layers, and textures she procures akin to the rolling Midwest landscapes that raised her.
With a folk-instrumental foundation and a fondness for anything from black metal to Chappell Roan play-pop, there is evidence to prove that the sound of the work Helfrich both creates and consumes holds far more weight and value than a lyric. Furthermore, she emphasizes to me that none of the sounds found on her upcoming project Dreams of a Sunflower River, or any previous Black Brunswicker project for that matter, have employed synthesizers to accomplish those tough-to-replicate scapes within each track. Instead, layers of strings, scattered pedalboards, and/or field recordings looped on tape are layered with earnest, yet easygoing intention.
I love any opportunity to get to talk to musicians like Etta, so I feel very spoiled to be sharing this conversation with you today. I hope you enjoy!
25F: I was reading about the Black Brunswicker project as a whole and found one term I really liked: “ambient folk melancholia.” With this record, what feels most accurate about that description, and what feels a little misleading?
Black Brunswicker: I probably started using that after I moved here and wanted to differentiate myself. It still fits to a degree. The album was recorded in 2019, and I’ve grown a lot as a songwriter and guitarist since then, but it still has the core Black Brunswicker idea: ambient music approached in a folk-adjacent way. There’s definitely melancholia in there—it reflects my state of mind at the time—and the emotions are fairly abstract. It’s less about one clear feeling and more about something you sit with.
You also work a lot with tape, including older, less predictable tape. Where’s the line between a happy accident and something that breaks the spell?
I don’t like dropouts or sudden cuts, so if they’re too jarring, I try to remove them. There are a few older tracks where a tape cut jumps back, and I kept it in, but in general, I’m picky. Old tape can be tricky—if it’s degraded, you might record something that sounds great through the monitors and then play it back, and it sounds terrible.
When you’re building loops, especially on tape, how do you know when to stop layering and call a piece finished?
My whole system is four‑track‑based—Tascams, one track for main guitar, a couple for drones and textures, and a fourth for field recordings or combinations. My test is simple: does it put me in a daze? If it does, it’s probably done. With older work, I’d stick to that four‑track approach with minimal editing. Now that I’m adding collaborators, that finish line is harder to see. There’s never a completely right or wrong answer to when you’re done.
What do you look for in collaborators, especially with music that’s so tonal and textural?
I’ll sometimes collaborate with people I barely know, just sending stems back and forth, but I prefer local people I know personally. I give them minimal prompts and let them follow their instincts. I also rarely pick “ambient” musicians. The vocalist who’s appeared a lot recently is a pop‑jazz singer with an ethereal voice. On my new album, recorded in Switzerland, there’s a pedal steel player who usually plays country. We ran her through effects to create ambient textures, even though that’s not her usual world.
I hear black‑metal textures and a lot of guitar in your older tracks. Is there a sound era of yours you’re still making peace with or revisiting?
I don’t use synths or keyboards at all—everything is guitar, 100%, shaped with delay, reverb, tape, volume swells, and texture. I love black metal; that’s where I started, and I’ve just formed a blackened sludge band here in Manchester. With Black Brunswicker, I don’t think I’ve fully escaped that noisy, textured ambient tone. Lately, I’ve been more into new‑age guitar—people like Will Ackerman and those old Windham Hill records—pushing toward minimal acoustic guitar with ambient textures around it. There’s a constant push‑and‑pull between that and heavier, hazier sounds. Dreams of a Sunflower River really feels like a transitional moment: still noisy and droning in places, but with more of the guitar playing coming to the front.
You’ve been based in Manchester for a while now. How has the city’s atmosphere and musical history filtered into what you’re making?
I’ve been here about five years. Before moving, I mostly knew Manchester as a post‑punk and electronic city that’s proud of its musical legacy. There’s music every night. The biggest shift for me has been thinking about writing for an audience and for live performance. I got into the scene through open mics; turning up with a guitar, a big pedalboard, and endless loops is interesting once, but after a while, it can bore people. That pushed me toward more folk‑oriented songs that still keep that ethereal, textural feel. I’m also in a band called Old Sun New Moon, where I do the same kind of guitar work under a singer‑songwriter who’s heavily influenced by Oasis, The Verve, and The Beatles. We filter those influences through a more ambient lens.
When you sit down with a guitar—especially in those folk or open‑mic settings—are you chasing a specific emotion, or do you mostly let your hands lead?
It’s both. I’ve talked before about struggling to identify and express emotions as a neurodivergent person—feelings often show up as vague shapes I can’t name. The guitar has helped me work through that. Sometimes just playing eases things, even when I can’t articulate what’s going on. So there’s intention in there, but also a lot of seeing where the moment goes.
With this record, loops and guitar feel like a key to improvisation. Is there such a thing as a “mistake” in this context?
Definitely: the wrong note, a sour note. On this album, there’s a track called “A Raga Called John,” based on John Fahey’s “Sunflower River Blues,” which is my favorite of his. In my recording, there was originally about thirty seconds more at the end, but at one point, as I slid up the neck, I hit a wrong note that ruined the take for me. The original fade‑out was nicer, but I had to rework the ending in the DAW. That’s what a mistake looks like for me—something that breaks the spell of the performance.
You’ve mentioned context a lot. Many instrumental artists avoid talking about what pieces “mean,” but is there a track—or a couple—that carries a specific story for you?
“Valley of Gold” on Dreams of the Sunflower River is a big one. The title comes from driving back from visiting a metal‑head friend in Greenfield, Indiana. Southern Indiana is really hilly, and one summer day I came down a hill into this valley of cornfields—just a sea of gold with the sun bouncing off it. That image stayed with me. Another one is “When My Memory Starts to Fade.” People sometimes ask if it references hauntology—it doesn’t. I was thinking about how friendships fade: how the shared time and the memory of you in someone else’s mind slowly thin out. A lot of my titles work that way—landscape‑y, textural, rooted in travel and time in nature.
Many of your titles—“High Peaks,” “Temple of Spring”—feel landscape‑based. Do you hear those songs in your head when you’re in the landscape, or does the music come first and the title later?
Usually, the music comes first. I record a lot, then start grouping tracks into a release. Some songs already have titles from the period I was playing them at open mics. Once I’ve got a batch, I think hard about the aesthetic: time of year, colors, the visual feel. The covers are mostly based on postcards, but heavily edited or even rebuilt in Photoshop. Temple of Spring, as a title, actually came from a misheard lyric. I loved a band called We Are Trees in my indie‑folk era and thought they sang “Temple of Spring.” Years later, after my album was out, I checked, and the actual line was “don’t attempt, or I’ll scream,” about someone’s suicide attempt. I barely listen to lyrics, so that threw me—but Temple of Spring was too good a title to lose.
What have you learned about your own attention span from making patient, slow‑building music like this?
Mostly that I don’t have a huge amount of patience. I’m almost always playing. That ties back to why there isn’t much silence in my work—I don’t often let loops sit, or reverb trails ring out on their own. A lot of ambient artists don’t perform live, or they perform behind keyboards and tables of gear. I see myself more as a folk guitarist who happens to play ambient music, and there’s a constant drive in me to keep the guitar moving.
Once this record is out and people have lived with it, how do you hope they’ll use it? And has anyone ever told you how they use your music in a way that stuck with you?
Not with this album specifically yet, but I do get a lot of messages. Some are very detailed about people using the music to work through anxiety, stress, or difficult times. I’m grateful for that—that’s a big part of why I make this kind of music. This record, like a lot of my work, is pretty abstract. It doesn’t clearly say “this is happy” or “this is sad.” I write in a modal way, so it’s neither strictly minor nor major; it just sits in between. I think those kinds of ambiguous moods can help people sit with themselves and be introspective. If the album gives someone space to think about their life—whether that brings up good or bad feelings—that feels like a success to me.
Listen to Dreams of a Sunflower River out on April 24. Follow Black Brunswicker on Instagram.
Great artist & great interview!