"Hymns for a Dark Horse," Bowerbirds' first album, is not an album to put on if you're in a hurry. Quiet, deliberate and meditative, it demands a certain amount of concentration and a willingness to sit still. But make the effort and the elegantly understated arrangements will carry you away, evoking images of misty Appalachian wildness -- the "back of beyond," in naturalist Horace Kephart's words.

Fittingly, given the music's organic sound, Bowerbirds fell together more or less by accident. Phil Moore found himself writing songs that called for a quieter approach than his former band, Ticonderoga, and things went from there.

"We didn't have a strategy, or even a plan to be a band," Moore says. "It started with a few songs that didn't seem to fit the Ticonderoga mode, that needed to be more stripped-down and acoustic."

At the time, Moore was living in the South Carolina wilderness with his girlfriend, the painter Beth Tacular. After they returned to the Triangle, they formed Bowerbirds with Moore's Ticonderoga bandmate, Mark Paulson. A key element of Bowerbirds' sound is Tacular's atmospheric accordion, which she taught herself to play.

"I thought I'd take lessons," she says. "But they were expensive and it was going to take too long. I had a month to get ready and I asked an accordion teacher how long it would take to be ready to play a show. 'If you work hard on the basic technique,' he said, 'six months.' Oops. So I figured it out on my own."