Terra Cotta, Astrachan, Hereboy, April Fools
Upstairs at Abyssinia
229 S 45th St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 9, 2025
Before the rain threw its dripping wrench into everyone’s biking-or-walking-home plans, a small crowd packed tight into Abyssinia’s upstairs back room and sat on the floor for Terra Cotta, the second of four artists performing before the sound curfew pulled its 10-p.m. plug. I’ve seen the band before, at Johnny Brenda’s, as a six-piece: there was classical guitar and flute and violin and upright bass and banjo and hand percussion and group singing.
At Abyssinia, they were merely a trio, just Gabriel García-Leeds (guitar, voice), Mariel Rice (voice), and Samantha Xiao Cody (violin). García-Leeds, Terra Cotta’s principal songwriter, sings without a hint of quaver or vibrato: there’s a comfortable, conversational, unaffected quality to his singing, like pitched chatter, an unassuming world-blending where poetry, speech and song are less meaningfully distinguishable, and more unified. (That goes for laughter, too: he warned us that for no apparent reason the song they were about to play makes him giggle when he’s singing it. Sure enough, we got a wordless chorus of giggle-song.)
One of the most prominent features in Terra Cotta’s performance was their deference, bordering on devotion, to the merits of melodic unison. Vocal harmonies are used sparingly: usually, García-Leeds and Rice sing the same thing, together, the guitar or the violin often joining in. On the surface, their songs are simple: García-Leeds sticks to open D tuning, and the melodies themselves are straightforward, plain, major and bright. You’re reminded of plainsong, folk music, sacred and liturgical and social music, all by design; in their accessibility and immediacy, Terra Cotta genuinely strives to highlight our common humanity. (D is, after all, “the people’s key,” as folk musicians like to joke.)
The melodies themselves cut to the quick in a way that makes them sound like nursery rhymes for gifted children, when they’re at their most imaginative; it doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that García-Leeds works sometimes with the Carnegie Hall Lullaby Project, teaching new and expecting mothers to write and sing their own lullabies for their young. Though far from amateurish, their songs nonetheless are evocative of childhood itself, and the music-making of early childhood, the chord voicings wide and open, are uncluttered and consonant. Underneath the singing – inviting and gentle as it persistently is – the accompaniment is syncopated and replete with rhythmic flair, with guitar techniques borrowing from flamenco, samba and John Fahey. Guitar figures were beautiful interlocking patterns, playfully pushing and interrupting one another, tricky and giddy. Where the vocals were unadorned and relaxed, Cody’s violin ached with the romantic, vibrant character of classical music, providing a captivating contrast.
If the music itself is in thrall to the harmonic series, the lyrics reinforce related feelings and perspectives: a recurrent theme is wide-eyed wonder and curiosity toward the natural world. It’s all delivered without a wink or hint of irony, so unflinchingly earnest that it earns my trust: “You told me love is evident in everything / and all of nature is a dance / one foot and then the next / from life and then to death,” they sang in their closing song, “I Found A Light." It’s heartening to hear such unguarded, direct sentiments: “I’ll turn my life into a song / make a sound, and then I’m gone,” were their parting words, landing with the weight of countless so-long’s.
