To say that Amer­ican poetry, as opposed to European, is more about land­scape than his­tory is surely an exag­ger­a­tion — cer­tainly when we extend this idea to music. Obvi­ously many nat­ive peoples have plenty of Amer­ican his­tory to draw on, and the des­cend­ants of European set­tlers have a few cen­tur­ies of their own to look back to. Europe, con­versely, does­n’t ignore its land­scape, as sev­eral recent releases covered here show (Task­er­lands, The Cloisters). That said, there does appear to be a strong con­nec­tion between the Amer­ican land­scape and its music. A recent reminder is Clint Heidorn’s Atwater LP, a highly lim­ited affair that at first sight looks like a black metal album.