Between the Acoustic and the Electric, Colorado Duo Woven Hollow Arrives at Last with Figure of Light

GLENWOOD SPRINGS, CO (July 17, 2026) - There is a space between the pluck of a guitar string and the hum of a synthesizer where something quietly unresolvable lives. Not conflict, exactly. More like the feeling of standing at the edge of two worlds and refusing to step fully into either one. It is the space where human longing resists the clean logic of the digital, where old things and new things press against each other without quite making peace. Some artists spend a career dancing around that tension. Woven Hollow - the Colorado-based folk duo of Anna Murphy and Van Wampler - firmly plant a flag in the middle of that tension with their debut full-length album, Figure of Light, on July 17, 2026.

Artists like Shovels & Rope, The Civil Wars, and Hozier have carved out a vital lane for folk music that refuses to stay put - pairing raw acoustic intimacy with production choices that widen the lens without losing the room. Woven Hollow belongs to that conversation, drawing equally on the orchestral intimacy of Sufjan Stevens, the austere vocal chemistry of The Secret Sisters, and the atmospheric production instincts of Frou Frou and Lana Del Rey. Figure of Light doesn't land squarely inside any one of those reference points., but rather is assembled from pieces of all of them, filtered through the specific experience of two people building a life together in the mountains of Colorado.

Anna Murphy and Van Wampler are based in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a small city tucked into the western slope of the Rockies, and the album carries that geography in its bones - the open space, the distance between people, the way isolation can feel like freedom until it doesn't. The duo married in 2024, and the closing track, "Chaparral," takes its name from the street where they live. They began tracking this album in 2019 and finished it across studios, states, and a global pandemic - coordinating a roster of more than a dozen collaborators in person and remotely to build out a record they were unwilling to rush. Anna, a multi-instrumentalist who expanded her range to tenor guitar and banjo in the course of making the record, brings melodic precision and harmonic intuition. Van serves as the project's primary architect - engineering, producing, and writing the majority of the material at his CinemaRaven Studios.

The sonic world of Figure of Light is wider than its folk foundation suggests. Ambience is woven into the record's DNA: the sustained, shimmering textures that run beneath many of the tracks were built by lightly bowing discordant harmonics on stringed instruments, creating a human-made electronic quality that echoes the album's central tension between the organic and the digital. Fiddle, banjo, tenor guitar, classical guitar, trumpet, flugelhorn, violin, viola, cello, and field snare share space with production choices drawn from pop and electronic music. Mastered by Idania Valencia at Sterling Sound, and mixed across three different engineers - including Jason Richmond on four tracks and Stu Stapleton on two - the record maintains cohesion while allowing each song to occupy its own corner of the emotional spectrum.

"Figure of Light," the opening title track, establishes the album's central image immediately: a light that leads, that beckons, that stays just out of reach. Its ambient shimmer - built almost entirely from those bowed harmonics - signals immediately that this is not a standard folk record. "Ten Feet Under" broadens the record's emotional range, moving through grief, longing, and the strange consolation of knowing time is finite. The song's bridge - "we don't have much time around / it may not seem so profound / but I guess you'll know what I mean once you're in the ground" - sits with the listener the way the best folk lyrics do: plainly worded, quietly devastating. "Battle Line," featuring bridge vocals from New Jersey-based artist 42RAE alongside field snare by Denver's Wes Barton and strings by Jess Townsend and Tom McCluskey, is the record's most sonically ambitious track, expanding into a full ensemble arrangement that traces the quiet wars fought between people who love each other. A music video for "Reruns" - which syncs clips from classic television with the song's lyrics about nostalgia and the inability to let go of the past - has earned festival recognition and is already in circulation.

Figure of Light features contributions from a cohort of accomplished Colorado musicians, including bassist Jeanette Adams, drummer Leor Manelis, banjoist Mac Benning, and fiddlers Camille Backman and Delaney Meyers, alongside collaborators who tracked remotely from across the country and internationally. Nashville vocalist Rochelle Riser delivers the lead on "Don't Worry Darling," the album's most open-handed song - an invitation to release shame, to let someone in, to stop waiting for the end before finally opening the door.

By the time Figure of Light reaches its closing notes, the tension it has held throughout the record - between connection and isolation, acoustic warmth and electronic cool, the past and what's still possible - doesn't resolve so much as settle. What lingers is what the best records always leave behind: the sense that someone sat down and told the truth about something, and that the telling cost them something real.

The sound of music and the beauty of the Rocky Mountains led the winding paths of Anna Murphy and Van Wampler to cross in 2017. A few recording sessions together quickly blossomed into an ongoing collaboration which quickly solidified itself as Woven Hollow. After recording a few songs and playing a short tour in 2019, the duet set out to record its first full-length album during the Covid lock down of 2020. Years of work on the album would see a number of incredible musicians adding their talent to Woven Hollow's compositions, and what started as a simple folk record grew into an adventurous project that can hardly be described by a single genre. 

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