Words by Sean Victory
When Sean Victory isn’t writing music or writing about music, it’s likely he’s listening to music. As a lifelong artist, his current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Humor me with this example: Dwight Eisenhower’s last dying breath in a jar has the missing—and some might argue, important—quality of an imprint on the audio realm. Theoretically, there could be a simple push button speaker on it that plays back the recorded memory of his last exhale. But can there really be a missing quality in an element that is in itself a completely false concept?
February finds a way. Despite mild meteorology, the bluster of resounding doom fills fresh voids, tickling at oblivion and its well of vices. No remedy for the panic attack of the year except to drive straight through, full throttle, but with uh… self-compassion and grace.
I was strangled by this very thing as I was writing about breath work, clockwork mechanisms, mantras, CPR and hypocrisy in acts of charity, playing a wind instrument, and the failure of our binary technologies. That is where my mind was when listening to music this past month.
The curtain seems to be falling on our planet, but in my Jesus-is-coming-soon fears as a child, I never imagined that people would be making art amidst it all. This is the why of my thinking on the sound of Dwight’s last breath. I arrived at this 0, by meditating on its 1: the preservation of Living Breath, like Sonny Rollins on Saxophone Colossus. So, in with the good for four seconds, hold on to it for another four, and out with the bad for a count of eight.
Memory Thirteen by Dead Bandit (Quindi Records) is an album clutch full of mood. The songs evoke such a powerful sense of atmosphere and cinematic essence that the listening experience begins to bleed into a visual one. A floor of analog tape snaking around your feet, with a guitar flickering tremolo twitching ‘tween ears, there’s a little misty spark between the notes where the breath of the song lives. True conjurers, the duo show a remarkable sense of vision in structuring their pieces.
“Circus,” with its playful yet menacing melody immediately made me think of the strobing smoke of Laura Palmer’s nightmare traincar escapades in Fire Walk with Me. Indeed, there’s a slow wave towards early Stars of the Lid songs as well. Somewhere in DeathTexas and hot, amps hum in a basement, instruments gently gesture, unsticking themselves from folding chairs, stirring and stirring to stir up a hissing tape. Others, like “Across The Road,” are the perfect crescendo of a helicopter you’ve heard in perpetual approach coming to a peak above your head, and fading away over the stone-dead Dan Ryan Expressway traffic to where the smog-strangled sun meets horizon meets the hospital with the Trauma Ward. “Two Clocks” sparkles in oversaturation, and twinkling in the dust is a fuzzy stillness of the hallowed Past. It’s an age-soaked sound of a glowing memory, similar to Pinkcourtesyphone.
The atmosphere of these songs is dense, magical in its staying-power. The second the air conditioner shuts off is the exact moment you realize how much space it was occupying in the room, and that its constant exhalation isn’t in fact the sound of your natural noise-floor.
The Closest Thing to Silence by Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu, and Marta Sofia Honer (International Anthem) is difficult for me to write about without also nodding toward Ariel Kalma’s other recent release, Orientation, a collection of meditations and song sketches where he lets his powers as a multi-instrumentalist shine.
Though he has a learned hand on whatever tools he decides to use, nothing burns brighter than his breath and embouchure on his saxophone. Just listen to the opening line on “Ten Hour Wave.” Solo, his sax bellows out a come-hither call to the others, and here comes the synth, and following at its heels the violin strides along. He is a prolific and accomplished artist, but beyond that, his performances and choice of collaborators mark him as especially skilled in his depth and his willingness to approach creating sound from nearly any angle. The Closest Thing to Silence reminds me of his collaboration with another musical workhorse and synthesist, We Know Each Other Somehow, Kalma’s album with Rob A.A. Lowe for the FRKWYS series on RVNG Intl.
Kalma was asked to pick some collaborators who he hadn’t previously worked with for BBC Radio 3’s series, Late Junction. He was drawn to Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer because of their collaborative debut, Recordings from the Åland Islands. Passing their contributions back and forth, they quickly met, then exceeded their commitment for the program, and decided to continue forward with the remnants. So here we have The Closest Thing to Silence—which is Music, by the way. In our world of everything getting out of hand, music frees us by giving us a controlled space for peace. Something like silence against the incessant clang of notifications, the geriatric barking of our future doom, and the tireless ploys hoovering up our every movement so that we can buy back algorithmically reduced versions of ourselves.
The music moves circuitally, not just in the retreading of melodic themes, but spatially where the various voices pan, vibrate, and undulate between channels. Chiu’s synths bounce across “Dizzy Ditty,” hit the adjacent wall and return the way they came. On “Ecoute Au Loin,” Kalma’s voice explains to us—and maybe this was originally a note to Chiu and Honer—how he is going to loop and layer to create a track. Then the words themselves begin to repeat exponentially at various offsets, quickly filling up the empty space as the content exercises a meta execution the spoken words have instructed. Like any meditation, the world we are separating from begins to creep back in, but as it intrudes we remember to return to the breath. Luckily, if that’s too much to ask, Kalma is happy to do so for us.
On more albums than not, the listener isn’t meant to hear the space in which the music is recorded. It ought to be a vanilla room that the engineer is beyond familiar with so there are no sonic surprises when it comes time to piece together a final mix. So, I’m always drawn to music that makes the recording space a part of the compositions.
On Breathing Landscape by Leslee Smucker (Beacon Sound) the location of the performance is the entire point. The album was recorded in an abandoned water tank in rural NW Colorado. Much like Deep Listening by Pauline Olivieros, the compositions emerge as the performer casts their instrument out into this hugely reverberant space, and turn their ears to what returns. Discovery fuels creation.
As the bow is first drawn across the strings on the opening track, “air placed formally,” there’s a brief pause where the sound of the instrument stands nude in the space. Then the sound of the water tank raises a simulacra, hollering back to violin from anti-violin. Smucker’s performance proves she is keenly aware of the attack and decay of the instrument in this space, and at no point does it seem she’s worked through the creative novelty afforded by the reverberance.
Throughout the record, Smucker allows the water tank’s voice to take the lead as she herself sits in rest. There are birds, somewhere deep in this cavern, chittering back at the silent stranger. Near the end of “fixed hills” there’s a deep thrum that rises into the space, which sounds like a plane passing overhead. The cistern not only amplifies and perverts the sounds occurring within, but it reaches into the surrounding landscape and splashes it across the singing walls and the lone soul communing within, calling it all down.
As the album goes on, the songs dig deeper and summon darker entities. “but a bird” feels like a slow and meticulous excavation of an eldritch artifact made for the undoing of the world, hauled up and howling into a pitch black night.
Whether or not this type of experimental/process music is the listener’s cup of tea, it is undeniable that Leslee Smucker taps into something far beyond her instruments. By simply putting herself in this place with the appropriate resources, she reaches out and points us toward an environment that points right back.