3 Hat Trio

Rooted in the natural world of their sacred homeland near Zion National Park in Utah, they say that their genre is ‘American desert music,’ a simple idea for a complex sound. The music 3hattrio are making sounds more like extended landscapes of sound, bare mesas that ring with electronic echoes of acoustic instruments, twisting and turning as the wind shifts. 3hattrio mix the routine with the unusual, fusing American folk music with outsider elements like autotune, psychedelia, and minimalism. It’s a wildly unusual sound, but the product of three very different musicians coming together to form something new. 3hattrio lives in a place that has a great and lasting indigenous imprint on it. They don’t attempt to perform the music of the nomadic Native peoples who have lived here for centuries. They are modern day settlers in a place where settlement is not all that old. Folklorist and musician Hal Cannon says, ‘From our vantage we are not all that different from other pioneers who came from diverse places to make community. From our varied musical backgrounds something truly American can be made out of the necessity to find sociability in an isolated place and to come with the intention to create something new.’ ‘Gloriously beautiful and savagely strange’ Marc Higgins, Northern Sky Magazine