Macie Stewart - When the Distance Is Blue

A Closer Listen

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,” writes Rebecca Solnit in the first of four elaborate, interconnected essays, each titled “The Distance of Blue,” collected in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  She writes of the blue of horizons, of ocean depths, but also the blue of separation, the blue of loneliness, the blue that suffuses the blues with emotion, seeping around the edges and from between the notes.  She compiles a blue mixtape, relays the tale of a woman who searches her entire life for the perfect blue, delves into the blue of art, Klein blue, blues lost and found and painted and sung.  The first printings of her book were inundated with grey, the latter printings progressively bluer, stretching toward their subject.  One wonders what she thinks of When the Distance Is Blue, inspired by her words, the album itself a field guide, the vinyl a cracked blue yolk floating in clear albumen.

Macie Stewart is also searching for the perfect blue: a musical hue that reflects ineffable truths.  She sings wordlessly in a French stairwell, strolls through a Tokyo fish market, records the sound of an international airport: a place between places, a blue between blues.  She plants dimes in her piano, pre-paying the strings.  Friends visit, each speaking their own blue truth: Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson, Zach Moore, cobalt, cerulean, azure.  She longs for places she’s never been, insights she’s yet to have, invisible blues that appear clear as they await the refraction of light.

Two pieces refer to memory, three the liminal: before and after, empty and full, the in-between.  Lia Kohl’s cello descends in a bathysphere of blue to where it is nearly black, where little light can penetrate, where the eye continues to squint, to search, to discern.  Fathoms below, creatures carry their own lights within them.  And yet, as the opening track seeps into “Tsuki,” there is laughter, the antithesis of blue, save where blue connotes sea, sky, the bluebird of happiness.

One may become intentionally lost when wandering through a distant market, a tapestry of memory, a piece of music.  As the tracks tumble together, they dislodge the listener in time.  The spell is momentarily broken as the first side ends, reforged in “Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New.”  Stewart’s piano notes echo like bells in a Tibetan temple.  The album is released at the spring solstice, as eggs are balanced on their heads and migration shifts north.  The video is a folded-paper world.

To sing in a stairwell is to be neither up nor down; to eschew words is to exist between silence and lyric.  Reverberation becomes conversation.  Stewart’s voice sounds turquoise and teal, enchanted by echo.  “In Between” relaxes into the sounds of children and dogs.  Ironically, even as it slows and stalls,”Disintegration” yields the album’s most memorable melody, a latch that bridges the distance between melancholic and serene, an iridescent, adaptable blue.  (Richard Allen)