Recently, New York-via-Philly's masterful guitarist Steve Gunn traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, to meet the iconic folk-bluesman Mike Cooper; their collaboration resulted in Cantos de Lisboa, the eleventh installment of RVNG's young-artist-meets-influential-artist FRKWYS series. Funneling Delta blues and American primitive guitar styles through southwestern Europe, the pair's record has now found its way further east to supremely beautiful northern Thailand, thanks to director Champ Ensminger, who's working for an NGO in Chiang Mai that focuses on documentary arts in photography and film for emerging Asian artists.
The video for "Pony Blues" is stunning, rewiring the frontiersy sprit of the song through this legend, as told by Ensminger: "In Thailand's northern countryside, a ghost story is told to warn young people and travelers from wandering into the jungle. Many years ago, a lonely stable boy in charge of the king's horses went hungry, and was forced into eating one of his horses. He became sick, and died in the jungle at the edge of a river. Since then, a spirit has been told to walk near the edge of the woods, taking the form of a human (man or woman) with the features of a horse. As revenge for his loneliness, the spirit of the stable boy lures young lost travelers into the jungle, where they meet a watery grave."
For more on Gunn, read our 2013 interview, and keep an eye out for his also-excellent, more singer-songwritery LP, Way Out Weather.
