Sally Anne Morgan Second Circle The Horizon

Sally Anne Morgan is an artist and naturalist in the purest senses. Raised on old time and Appalachian folk traditions, Morgan’s artistry embodies the rich life of the communities and natural world she surrounds herself with. Based in Alexander, NC in the thick of Appalachia, and edge of the Pisgah National Forest, Morgan’s blend of traditional technique and distinctly modern compositional approach are infused with the sounds of her garden, surrounding pastures, forests and mountains. The rhythms of nature, its flora and fauna, are inseparable from her work which is in constant conversation with the people and places around her. Second Circle The Horizon is a meditation on returning, uncovering the new within the familiar and recognizing the familiar within the new.

Morgan’s compositions, on Second Circle The Horizon, are vivid, translating an ineffable feeling triggered by environmental sounds into music that feels as natural and free as the intersecting chirps of Carolina Wrens, the rustling of grass, and her sheep’s movement through a meadow. The album returns to the approach Morgan took with her more improvisational album Cups (2021), and threads in the preternatural songcraft of Carrying (2023). “I wanted to capture the feeling of walking outside and encountering organic nature sounds, some with patterns, some with a randomness that also verges on its own kind of pattern,” notes Morgan. Abstraction in pursuit of free exploration of that which can’t be put into words, balancing with an intentional structure of song lies at the album’s core. Morgan gave herself into the free instinctual pursuit of ideas, while her experience resulted in pieces that move organically in structured arcs. “I have played so many fiddle tunes, the fiddle tune, the structure, the melody, are at the root of all music I make, whether I want them to be or not,” Morgan continues. “Old time fiddle music is the seed that grew into the part of my brain that makes music, and everything I do somehow seems to come back to that. I think something gets lost when you’re too focused on honing and refining everything. Someone who is not focused on virtuosic playing, but more rustic simplicity and spaciousness, there is life and energy to it, electricity.”



The album’s title, taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles, pulls directly from the line “The Eye is the First Circle, the horizon is the second.” This distinction of looking out beyond oneself and the cyclical nature of life’s patterns became central focuses of Morgan’s outlook and craft. In her own experience, circling back to her second pregnancy and to the ideas that started Cups, coincided with her desire to meditate on circularity, to take in, create, and unleash something new imprinted with her voice as part of the chorus around her. The pieces themselves are true evocations of environmental atmosphere, replete with fleeting moments of joy, the buzzing din and repetitions of daily life, and spells of quiet solace.



Guest synthesist Sean Dunlap (Field Patterns) and hurdy-gurdy player Brian “Geologist” Weitz (Animal Collective) embellish pieces with droning thrums and sonic moss. The fiddles dance gracefully across the bedrock of banjo loops on “Flowers of Sandihar”. The lush “I Saw a Heron” speckles modal piano figures over a violin that sounds out from below, as if played at the bottom of a gorge. Slow guitar arpeggios on “Eye is the First” are met with plunking banjo and otherworldly, mimicking yet subtle synth tones. Longtime collaborator/mixer Joseph Dejarnette’s bass gently underpins Morgan’s reimagining of folk tune “Callahan” into a more dramatic arc.



Second Circle The Horizon is an album built on Morgan’s singular artistic voice as an improviser and composer intertwined with deft intuition. Morgan’s music highlights her bond with nature, and how its beauty and the beauty of artistic creation are interwoven. The album celebrates creation, revels in discovery, and marvels at the complex patterns, intersectional cycles and simple beauty of a creative life intertwined with the natural world.