The process of mining – digging deep into the earth to find an essential material – dates back at least forty-three thousand years. However, the process was not modernized until the adoption of rail in the 1550s. Carts would accumulate the laborers’ findings and move them to the surface. Two centuries later, James Watt used similar technology to transport those collections near and far. Often, such was powered by the very coal extracted from the same subterranean holes and guided along lines made of steel, the source of which was similarly derived. Ultimately, mining and rail are inexorably circularly related and reinforce one another. These concepts also provide a strong conceptual underpinning to Ava Mendoza’s The Circular Train (Palilalia, 2024).

Like her miner ancestors – in both Montana and Bolivia –  on The Circular Train, Mendoza blasts and picks through what many view as a hard surface of stylistic norms to extract the musical essence that shines within. Across the solo guitar record, elements of art rock, free jazz, Americana, folk music, country music, the Blues, and more emerge and organically present themselves in ways that honor their source material while proclaiming cross-genre commonalities. Specifically, she fractures preconceptions of what it means for a music to be “of the people” to show the interconnectivity across peoples and cultures. Consider, for instance, the album’s closer, “Irene, Goodnight.” A standard of mixed-genre origins that the guitarist has played for over twenty years, Mendoza pays homage to Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, the Weavers, Ernest Tubb, and countless other covers through the years while adding her own flair of avant-garde experimentalism and even a slight tinge of surf rock. 

This malleability of form comes directly from the lessons learned during Mendoza’s impressive career thus far, including collaborations with William Parker, Fred Frith, John Zorn, and Nels Cline. The ideas expressed throughout The Circular Train, wide in scope, are not disjointed or devoid of form. Instead, the sonic stops form points upon sturdy tracks. Over those paths, the slow-burning engine of Mendoza’s guitar steadily glides through stories of family histories across continents and then back around again. 

We sat down with Mendoza to discuss The Circular Train, some of her artistic influences, and more. It has been edited for clarity and conversational flow.

PostGenre: Where does the idea of The Circular Train come from? 

Ava Mendoza: Jenn Pelly, who wrote the press blurb on the record, called it a  “psychogeographical train ride”. I think that’s as apt a description as any. I love car and train rides, which is good because, as a touring musician, I’m on them a lot. 

A lot of my favorites of my own music were written on car and train rides, mostly in rural areas where I can sort of meditate on the landscape. I would consider most of the music on this record driving/riding music. It has the feeling of momentum, acceleration and deceleration, of seeing people and animals, buildings and landscapes pass by, wondering about their past and present, etc. 

Some of the music on the record was written with very specific locales in mind. “Pink River Dolphins” is tied to a place I went to in the Bolivian Amazon, where there are pink dolphins. And then, some of the music was written while traveling. I came up with most of ”Cypress Crossing” while driving in Mississippi through an area with a lot of bald cypress. I sang it into my phone while I drove. There are six songs, and five stops on the train’s route– outside Tutwiler, [Mississippi] / north of Rurrenabaque, Bolivia / north of Cerro Rico, Bolivia / the mines in Chayanta, Potosi, [Bolivia] and Butte, [Montana] together in one song and stop / Shreveport, Louisiana. For “Shadow Song,” there is no stop; it’s just a song based on the train ride itself in between stops. All the locales have either deep family significance or musical significance for me. They are so important to the music, they are the music in a way.

I find a lot of the music on the record to feel cyclical, to be about finding a deep comfort in repetition. So the concept of the whole thing being a train ride kept coming back to me. Of being on a course that gets repeated again and again through the same places, of the acceptance and embrace of that cycle. 

PG: In tying each track to a location – Mississippi, Bolivia, and Montana – did you consciously incorporate some of the aesthetics of folk music from those places? 

AM: It varies from song to song. With four of the songs, the tie to location is more the feeling that I got from being in that place– its people, landscape, and wildlife– and less directly tied to its music. “Pink River Dolphins,” for example, is tied to a place in the Amazon in northern Bolivia where there are pink dolphins, but the song doesn’t sound like any Bolivian folk music I’ve ever heard. Same with “Ride to Cerro Rico,” which is tied to the famous mine in Potosi, Bolivia. But it is more a meditation on the landscape around there than a direct reference to any folk music from nearby. In two cases, however, I’d say the songs do directly reference the area’s music.

“Cypress Crossing” is tied to Tutwiler, MS because I wrote it while driving through there. This is in the Delta, where all this music I’ve always loved is from. I’ve done my best to learn about the history and folklore from there, but I wrote it the first and only time I’d actually been there. There is a certain wonderful slow, flat, nothing around-ness to that land that makes an equivalent kind of music and melody feel right in it. There is a lot of interesting current music going on there that I found out on that trip, but it also feels so heavy and haunted with history. I was driving around, and thinking about the past and present of the place when I started to hear these two melodies back to back. I recorded them singing into my phone, as I often do, to remember later.  I love music from around there very much but ultimately I’m an art rock and free jazz-damaged Latina girl from southern California. So, the melodies came out their own way, with weird textures and a rhythm in 5/8. [laughing]. I was definitely kind of meditating on the music from the area in that case, but allowing it to take as personalized and abstracted a form as possible. 

PG: And the other song where you directly reference a locale’s music is  “Irene, Goodnight.”

AM: Yes, in the liner notes I tie “Irene, Goodnight” to Shreveport, Louisiana, which is where Lead Belly, who first recorded the song, grew up. I have been playing the song for over twenty years now. There are a few other songs I’ve been playing solo for just as long, but somehow “Irene” is the one that I feel I was able to adapt and – hopefully – deepen the most over that time as my playing evolved. I included that song because I felt it fit with the others, and playing it for so long has led me to develop my own style and the style of the original songs on the album. 

My arrangement took Lead Belly’s version as inspiration, because it’s the interpretation of the song that is the most near and dear to me. I tried to reference some aspects of his guitar style in my playing– walking bass with the thumb, real chunky, thick chordal playing– while doing my own thing with all of it. So, that song is tied to at least Lead Belly’s version of the folk music from around Shreveport.

PG: “Irene, Goodnight” is a piece that has moved from bluegrass to blues to folk music. 

AM: It’s a really interesting tune in terms of lineage. It was written by Gussie Lord Davis in 1886, who is from Ohio originally and became the first successful Black Tin Pan Alley composer. Lead Belly claims he started playing it as early as 1908. He recorded it in 1933. At some point in there or later, it also became an Appalachian standard… and that music eventually started being called bluegrass. 

And then later on Pete Seeger and ‘60s folk people started playing it. So it’s had all these different lives in different genres and scenes. I like a lot of early bluegrass very much, but I don’t follow it and don’t consider myself deep in. Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe… The Louvin Brothers have always scared me though! 

PG: In a performance you had last fall with Mayan Space Station here in Austin, a friend commented that he sensed a very slight twang influence in your sound and made references to Duane Eddy, Carl Perkins, Elvis, and that whole Sun Records sound with huge hollow-bodied guitars. Is that type of music much of an influence on you? 

AM: I love Duane Eddy! Sure and many Sun Records folks… Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Cash especially. Does twang mean country specifically? That’s definitely an influence… Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank W I, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, all the outlaw country people especially Waylon Jennings. As far as guitarists from that world, Roy Buchanan is a big influence. I love his phrasing and feel… blues and country shredding with extended technique, all the cool pinched harmonics pedal steel-esqe bends. He was also a big influence on Robert Quine (Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Brian Eno etc). There is this continuum of country/blues spazz to punk spazz that I really relate to, and maybe am related to. [laughing].

PG: Going back to how the pieces on The Circular Train tie to locations with deep family significance, do you often consider heritage when making music? 

AM: This album is the most directly I have ever considered it. Which may not be saying much, because four songs are instrumental, and the two vocal songs don’t straight up reference my family history at all. [Laughing]. But I would say there’s an undercurrent and aesthetic that runs through the record, and those came together from heritage research I’ve done in the last couple years. 

On both sides of my family, there’s a history of working in and around mines– my mom’s side in the Butte, Montana copper mine, and my dad’s side, the Quechua branch of his family, in the Chayanta, Potosi, Bolivia silver mines. The landscapes in these two distant places are also weirdly similar– landlocked, with dramatic craggy mountains, and flat, barren plains leading out to these. There are lots of juicy family stories, and these last few years I’ve been trying to research and sort out the truth and the tall tales. Official events like birth, marriage, death, or immigration-related stories have the clearest documentation, so I learned a lot from those. I’ve gone mainly three generations back; to my great-grandparents.

Among the stories that checked out, and some new ones I found, were: fatal barroom brawls, secret interracial marriages, flights from the country in political exile, fatal arson attacks by roving bandits, deathbed marriages, sex work and mysterious fatalities in brothels, hunting accident fatalities, and week-long trips by donkey into the heart of mining territory. I’m sure events like these exist on other continents, but in the context of my bloodline they are all so much tied into the history of the Americas in general. I gradually learned all this new information – a lot of which was vastly different from what I had heard growing up – and kept thinking how much it felt like something from a western B movie. [laughing]. 

But I was also surprised by how deep it went in the history of the Americas in general. And all the differences and commonalities between these two places on two different continents. In both, this idea of available “frontier” runs through the history and propels a lot of it. Enormous stretches of land that are very much inhabited, but which were considered prime, available real estate and economic opportunity by Europeans on arrival.  Musically and lyrically, all of this percolating around sort of helped define the aesthetic of this record. I have always felt like my solo music is Americana in a broad, strange way, and that deepened with this record. Solo music, besides what I mentioned earlier, gives me a chance to meditate on my roots in a way I feel like would be more selfish in a group context. 

PG: Is that opportunity to meditate what you enjoy most about solo performance? 

AM: I have always loved listening to solo guitar and voice music, especially the early blues folks, and some Latin American and classical guitar music. It feels natural and fulfilling for me to write and play music that way. It also simplifies things in terms of making decisions. I can play any setlist I want on a given night, and can play the music as tight or loose, as long or as short, as I want. I can make the records however I want. I can only disagree with myself, so I’ve got it down to one person and that makes the process more streamlined! It’s also great timewise to be able to work on the music anytime I can fit it in, instead of only at scheduled rehearsals or gigs as with a band. 

PG: And where did the idea of making each of the pieces a slow-burning song fit into the overall picture?

AM: I often find myself wanting the world to slow down, so I’ve come to enjoy living in some slowness musically. Beyond that, many of the songs here were written, or their arrangements were crystallized, during COVID lockdown. For musicians, things were for real slowed down. In the middle of a disaster, I think many of us also felt the benefits of the slower pace– for physical and mental health, and also for some of us creatively– different and sometimes deeper stuff came out. 

PG: You sing on two of the tracks on the album. You also sang for the entirety of The Paranoia Party (New Atlantis, 2021). What guides you in deciding whether and how to incorporate vocals? 

AM: From the start, I knew for this record I wanted the singing to just pop up here and there, on one track or maybe two. I think of music, in general, as a type of storytelling, whether it’s instrumental or includes vocals. Sometimes the story needs lyrics, and sometimes it doesn’t– that need is what guides me the most. 

PG: One of the two tracks with vocals is “Pink River Dolphins.” What is it that draws you the pink dolphin as a subject? 

AM: What doesn’t haha? They’re powerful, intelligent, pink, master hunters, make amazing sounds, have unique echolocation… [laughing]. They even clean their territory in the river when branches fall in, pushing them onto the banks or downstream. They’re psychogeniuses! 

I learned about them in 2016 and got really hooked. As I mention in the liner notes, I took a trip to the Bolivian Amazon and encountered them there. They’re not dangerous to humans, and they keep the crocodiles out of their territory. So, you can swim with them, and we did… they swam all around us playing and making these incredible noises, one of them touched my dad with its nose, and we watched them clean up their territory. 

No one knows exactly why they swam upriver from the Pacific millions of years ago. But in the process they developed this really detailed echolocation, more fine-tuned for narrow rivers than their open ocean relatives’. They’re also endangered so I feel like it’s good to get the word out about them. 

PG: Your vocals for the piece also mention echolocation. Of course, your last album was also called Echolocation (AUM Fidelity, 2023). How do you feel the idea of echolocation fits into your work? Is it a reflection on how music may take you to a space mentally and is used as a guide to get around that space? 

AM: Yes, and more. First off, I just love the idea of navigating with your ears instead of your eyes. I’m a musician and biased toward sound! And I feel music is a way of learning our environments and each other; for me listening to other musicians play can give soooooo much information about their character– often much more than having a verbal conversation with them. 

In “Pink River Dolphins” I’m also trying to talk about something broader than sound/music. “Make a sound, it comes back around/ Make a sound to sus out your surroundings”– what you put out into the world comes back to you. I think that is a good principle to live by, and also simply a fact. It applies almost anywhere… the echo of a sound bouncing back, personal relationships, community relationships, environmental justice, political blowback across continents, etc. 

Reciprocity is a concept in many cultures… I’m most familiar with it in Andean culture, where it’s called ayni. It’s the idea of mutual aid and support– the saying goes “today for you, tomorrow for me.” The idea is used as a positive principle, but it works negatively as well… if you put harm into the environment around you, you get it back. 

‘The Circular Train’ is out now on Palilalia Records. You can purchase it on Bandcamp. More information on Ava Mendoza is available on her website.

Photo credit: Jim Hensley