Flutes & Low are a thoughtful and soothing new band with a debut album (Lay Fallow) coming out at the Pillar Forum on April 1, 2026. There’s something ethereal and timeless about the music and weirdly perfect for winter.
Please tell us about yourselves and how the band got together.
I (Cambria) am originally from the twin cities and went to college at UMD. I’ve played guitar since I was in middle school, and grew very interested in music production in late high school. I minored in music at UMD, and was in a vocal jazz group. I’ve always been super into folk music, and a good amount of indie rock and alternative as well.
I (Ben) am from west-central Wisconsin, in a little town called Mondovi near Eau Claire. I started learning piano at a young age, which led me to studying it for a time in college (also at UMD), starting with classical and transitioning to jazz. Songwriting was something I started to pick up around middle school as well. During my college years I started playing with a couple different jazz combos and indie bands, one of which I’m still in to this day. Along with this main project, Flutes and Low, of course.
We met through the vocal jazz group at UMD, in which Cambria sang and Ben played piano. Little conversations led us to discover a lot of shared interests, and we started playing music together, the first time being in a practice room on campus. We’ve been together ever since! Very early on we were both very excited to get a duo project started. We created a group of songs that we were very excited about, and after a search for producers that wasn’t working out, we decided to tackle creating a full album on our own on Cambria’s protools setup in our apartment.
Lay Fallow is your debut album. It’s an interesting name; the songs are beautiful and are certainly seeds that will flourish. Maybe in the title, the language and nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins in your band name, there’s an old sound to the music – like ghosts resurrected. How did you approach the album? Did you have songs you curated? Or maybe set out with an intention to create songs for the collection?
That’s a huge compliment, because it’s definitely a hope of ours that our songs have that older, melancholic feeling in them. We seem to resonate a lot with music and stories that seem almost like a jump in time, or that are evocative of timeless themes. A lot of these involve calls to seasons, deep emotion, or more natural poetry, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The way we approached the album wasn’t necessarily with an overarching theme—that more-so came to light when we had completed it and looked at it as a whole. Instead, we had a set of songs that we started with, and a couple more that were written after we had established our goal to create an album. There are a couple of tracks that are more narrative fictional tales, like Sifting, To Glass, or Armistice, and some that are more personal emotional works. Regardless of their basis, both of us write with strong visual ties, inspired by works like Hopkins, other poets, or even our favorite artists like Bon Iver. Some of the songs were written mainly by one of us, and others collaboratively in the same room. Additionally, some of the songs were almost a year and a half old by the time the album was finished, and others like Requiem in B Minor were written only a month before its completion based on current events surrounding us.
The theme became more evident once the project was finished, and we decided on the name Lay Fallow. The word “fallow” stood out to me (Cambria) in a book that I was reading at the time, and we instantly felt there was a strong connection with the work. Not only does it tie to our connection with Midwest life and agricultural lifestyles, but the word also represents an intentional dormant period in which a field is able to restore nutrients and rejuvenate for future growing seasons. Looking at our collection of songs, there are moments of love, warmth, and life… but also moments of heavier honesty, struggle, wistfulness. Sometimes our metaphorical field may be plentiful and vibrant, but sometimes it’s more barren and grey. We all live in these personal seasons of fluctuation and change, and those contemplative and restorative moments in between are when we “lay fallow”.
Can you tell me about Long Winter? There’s something about the sound of it that reminds me of Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s in the vocals and there’s something just almost physically grabs me.
Yeah! Long Winter was a song that was a long time coming. It was one I (Ben) sort of had written but sat on the backburner until I showed it to Cambria, and we decided it needed to come to fruition. You mentioned Neutral Milk Hotel, which seems perfectly fitting to me since I’ve always loved their stuff. Especially how the feeling pours through in a unique way through the almost non-standard vocal styles. In Long Winter I wanted to tell a very simple but very sharp visual story. One that almost anyone who’s lived through a winter could resonate with. It’s sort of the idea of staying warm and finding solace in those long winters (either literal or otherwise). I really wanted the vocal movement to reflect that sentiment, and I think it turned out really well.
Requiem in B Minor is an eerie song in part because of the lyrics and the moving beat of the music. I feel like I’m on a train moving closer to something that may or maybe not be a relief. Which came first in the creation – the lyrics or the music?
The music came very shortly before. It was the last song we wrote for the album and had to come pretty quickly to make sure we got it written before some deadlines. Once we started writing it just flowed though. Ironically, it all started with me playing around with a sort of simple guitar idea, something that you would hear out of Townes Van Zandt perhaps. And it soon morphed into what it is now, a steady droning crawl with a certain folk-country flavor. The main melody came out piece by piece as a hum, and eventually the lyrics followed. After hearing about the shooting at Annunciation late last August, we knew we wanted it to be about that in some kind of way, and we modeled it in a way almost akin to some old Irish murder ballads. In that way we definitely wanted it to touch on something tragic but also propose a sense of hope to the listener, hence the refrain “Mother/Father I’m home”. We hope the song can give people certainly a sense of the eeriness of human life, but also its beauty.
Please tell us about the album release party.
We are super excited to play at Pilllar Forum on April 1st! It will be our first show with more bandmates beyond just the two of us; we’ll have Calvin Caron playing bass and Saul Myhre joining us on drums. We love playing shows as the duo, but it will be such a blast to have a bigger sound to perform the album. Before us, Halle Hanson and Josie Langhorst will both have sets as well. We know of Halle through some mutual friends in the cities, and Josie through some friends up north in Duluth (even though she’s moved to the cities since then), but it feels a bit like our two cities colliding. Both of them are going to play some amazing tunes, and we are really excited to hear what they’ve prepared as well.
It’s going to be really magical to bring the album to life for everyone who comes out. It’ll be an all ages show with music starting at 6:30, and tickets are available now! We really appreciate everyone who comes out to see live music with us, it means the world.
Mostly Minnesota 