Self-Portrait: Tenci

Artwork by Mickey Miles

For our Self-Portrait series, we invite our favorite musicians to create an audio depiction of themselves through songs from the past and present.

With their ‘20 debut My Heart Is An Open Field and last year’s follow-up A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing, Tenci have proliferated their knotty bedroom folk into an exquisite and rarefied rank of abstract indie songcraft. The bandleader, Chicago’s Jess Shoman, unloads an hour’s worth of inspirational sounds ranging from the detectable work of Lucinda Williams, Low, and Arthur Russell to some more discreet touchstones from Aqua to Tierra Whack.