Take Five: Connections and contexts
Catching up with Eisenberg, previewing Davachi, remembering Branch with Håker Flaten, recontextualizing R.E.M., and connecting Huffman, Everett, and Prine in a wide-ranging week of discovery
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
1. Wendy Eisenberg - Viewfinder
After mentioning Wendy Eisenberg in passing last week, I was happy to spend time with their new album, Viewfinder, this week. After getting Lasik surgery so they could see better, Eisenberg created music inspired by the change. "Finally able to see the world unmediated, everything about my relationship to tactility, immediacy, and perception changed," they write. "I could no longer blame the distance and otherness I feel in this world on the too-fallible panes of glass or plastic that delivered the visual world closer to me. I had to write myself into clarity about the closeness I now felt to the visual world, how disorienting clarity can be." It's a fascinating subject for an album. In spots like the opening "Lasik" and "Set a Course," it reminds me of the work of Caroline Shaw, a sort of genreless musicality centered on their pleasant if unconventional vocals. Elsewhere, this is more traditional left-field jazz, instrumental music that foreground's Eisenberg's guitar while not letting it dominate as the other players are given room to explore. The centerpiece is "After Image," a sprawling 22-minute tune that lets the players solo over Eisenberg's metronomic guitar lines, the resonance holding on like the song's namesake after each instrument lays out to make way for the next before a cacophonous burst of percussion clears the frame and the other instruments come back into focus.
2. Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir
My organization has produced a festival the past few years that celebrates intersections of chamber music and literature, and I have grown accustomed to discerning those connections even when they aren't obvious on first listen. I must admit, however, that it will take me some time to figure out how Sarah Davachi's new The Head as Form'd In the Crier's Choir is informed by Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Claudio Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. These are long minimalist suites written for sparse instrumentation: a solo pipe organ here or mellotron, viola and trombone there. A subtle shift in tone might take a minute to unfold as the drone of a single note carries. There is no melody per se, no beat. But, thanks to things like the Feed Me Weird Things series here in Iowa City, I have developed my ear (and my patience) for such sounds, listening for something to be revealed in the slightest variation. This is music that rewards the attentive listener, but it also allows one to simply be enveloped in sound without the need to listen closely to every moment. Speaking about the album with Aquarium Drunkard, Davachi said, "It’s interesting how something so well-known can seem contrastingly new when you revisit it from a particular direction, as opposed to something more obscure. The contrast allows it to have such a stark difference." She was talking about the Rilke poems, but she could have been talking about the pipe organ tones here, so familiar to anyone who has been in a church. Taken out of that context, you hear it in a different way. I imagine having this playing a lot in the next few weeks, revealing something new each time.
Davachi will perform as part of the FEaST festival in Iowa City, held Oct. 30-Nov. 2.
3. Ingebrigt Håker Flaten - Breezy
I wasn't familiar with Norwegian jazz bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten by name when I learned of the new album by his project (Exit) Knarr, but that didn't stop me from diving in. The album is named Breezy, and anyone who knows modern avant garde jazz knows that was the nickname of Jaimie Branch, the gone too soon trumpeter whose brief bright streak of creative music made her 2022 passing a tragic event. Håker Flaten had worked with Branch in the past and dedicated the album to her. Listening to the joyous cacophony created by this septet, one can hear Branch woven into the songs. But Håker Flaten also cites, Anthony Braxton, Alice and John Coltrane, Sun Ra and others, and you can hear strains of all of it here. It is a brief album, just five relatively short tracks, but it offers a full sonic palette. In the space of two tracks, we travel from the horn-heavy workout of "Free the Jazz" (inspired by Eddie Harris's "Freedom Jazz Dance") to the hushed, piano-driven spirituality flowing into a manic guitar burst on "Hilma." The closing "Breezy" is a tour de force. Starting with Håker Flaten's unaccompanied bass, it slowly builds with piano, drums, and horns, but it remains at a slow boil for a long stretch, a funereal tribute to a fallen friend. As it passes the halfway point of its eight-minute runtime the instruments burst forth, a swell of cries — rage, grief, longing — that coalesce into a life-affirming squeal. You are gone but we are still here. Hear.
4. R.E.M. - We Are Hope Despite the Times
I love listening to music in new contexts because it frees the ear and mind to hear new things. When a song no longer follows its usual antecedent on an album, but instead comes in after something new, you immediately discern new elements. R.E.M. may be the band whose music benefits most from such an exercise. Cue up any song, and I can instantly see the album cover, hear the songs that come before and after. So the release of the new 18-track compilation We Are Hope Despite the Times was both a pleasant recontextualization and a little ray of light as we look toward November. The tracklist draws from the band's most strident, clear-eyed period, from 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant through 1992's Automatic for the People. It was released last week on National Voter Registration Day, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. R.E.M. was always political, but I must admit I didn't always understand the message — partly due to Michael Stipe's early mumbling and partly due to my inattention to lyrics — but hearing the songs here, I begin to piece together the larger narrative of activism and social responsibility. In the words of "These Days," the track that gives the compilation its title, "Happy throngs, take this joy wherever, wherever you go."
Click here to stream/download We Are Hope Despite The Times
5. Connecting Huffman, Everett and Prine
I like to take note of the accidental connections between and among the things I consume culturally, the serendipitous, unintentional conversations you create by picking up this book at the same time you listen to that song. The latest brings together Percival Everett and Jane Huffman. My book club is reading Everett's Half an Inch of Water, a 2015 story collection centered on ranching country in Wyoming. I expected to come across the title phrase somewhere, overtly or otherwise, in its pages. Instead, I came across something close in a poem in Huffman's new collection, Public Abstract. In the poem "Mosquito," Huffman begins,
Not the same thing — twice as deep, actually — but close enough when reading the two on the same day to note the coincidence. I went back to the Everett, but never found a connection to the title in the text. Reading a review, I found a plausible explanation, a quote from a John Prine song, "That's the Way the World Goes 'Round": “That’s the way the world goes ‘round / You’re up one day and the next you’re down. / It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.” That fits these stories of people on the edge, who sometimes seem to imagine things being worse than they are, needing a sprinkling of magical realism to muddle through. That edge-walking seemed fitting as I returned to Huffman's poems, their explorations of form and the fragmentary nature of some of the work — just how much is necessary for something to count as a poem? — walk their own edges. I won't do any additional mental gymnastics to connect the third element here today, but this may all send me on a Prine jag nonetheless.