A Closer Listen
Whatever medium of creation we explore, it seems artists never get too far away from the Earth and its landscapes. Some explore threatened environments, whilst others retreat into familiar terrain for nostalgia and remembrance. Two upcoming releases dwell on inhabited places, humanising the locations of their album titles, but never falling back into comfortable platitudes. Both albums also evoke enclosed spaces, which can reply by rebounding sound or reflecting light.
On Breathing Landscape, Leslee Smucker’s violin probes the environment with exploratory sound from a hidden retreat. Recorded inside an abandoned water tank, this is an album that celebrates the extended decay of sound in a cavernous space. Whether in single lines of sound or in richly overlapping notes, the violin meets its own voice speaking back. When tones layer and rebound, Smucker’s instrument swells to almost an orchestral string section. Deep drones and echoey ambience dominate some of the compositions. The violin slips into the background as the airy vibrations of the tank take centre stage.
On this solo album, Smucker occasionally offers wordless vocals over the reverb of her strings. As we hear the evidence of breath in the tank, it is tempting to envision an iron lung that respirates for the landscape. When wind rumbles beyond the metal shell, we are reminded of the world’s own breath. Smucker also makes use of percussive sounds to counter the to-and-fro of bowed strings. Metallic bursts suggest a striking of the chamber itself, whilst the plucked strings and tapped body of the violin plosively respond, sending sonic ripples through the air.
Named after a 1930s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, the album titles its tracks with fragments of verse. The speaker of the poem lies in the sun, connected to the landscape but seemingly detached from their human peers. The patterned repetition (still/still, fixed/fixed, each/each) suggests a circling back of ideas. This is matched by Smucker’s violin, which can feel like a process of undecided thought. It sounds out, pauses until silence, and begins pondering once again. “Silence hangs in the air”, curiously, is not a line Smucker recycles. It is not silence but sound that reverberates here. The most fitting title, “continuing underground”, is given to a subterranean, otherworldly piece. Sharp notes are swallowed up by insistent waves of drones, which accrue extra energy in the vacuumous space.
Whilst Smucker’s environ breathes, Concepción Huerta’s remembers. Reflected by the front cover, the album draws inspiration from a visit to the obsidian mines of Hidalgo in Huerta’s native Mexico. Obsidian was vital to Mesoamerican culture across centuries, and Hidalgo is an historically significant region for mining. In parallel with this tangible experience, the album imagines a more supernatural journey into the centre of the Earth. Huerta’s sonic palette is deep and elemental, with synth drones reverberating in spacious darkness. Tones build and reform over geological swathes of time, whilst glassy deposits catch chinks of celestial light.
At a pivotal moment in the journey, foreboding strings and metallic distortion mark the uneasiness of our descent. As our ears adjust the darkness, claustrophobia gives way to a sense of vast expanse, with synth lines rumbling deeper into caverns. Huerta breathes an organic life into her electronic palette, just as she pinpoints a mineral richness among dark rock. Though it’s very early days, it will have to be an outstanding year for the genre for Huerta not to show up as one of our 2024 choices of drone music.
At the climax of the album, higher frequencies give a sense of liquid heat. The solidity of the Earth shows its primordial state: a brightly hot, animated force. Fittingly, if obsidian has a memory it is of red magma cooling rapidly to a dark glass. Perhaps this is an apt metaphor for drone music, which often has ferocious intentions, solidified into a smooth surface. As our journey into the Earth concludes, it takes on added peril in ominous drones and resonant calls into the darkness. Human stories of the underworld are always with us. Just as obsidian offered ancient peoples a reflective surface in which to have sacred visions, so the darkness itself can hold up a mirror to the human observer. (Samuel Rogers)
Fri Jan 19 00:01:54 GMT 2024