Mending is the recording project of Kate Adams and Joshua Dumas. The Chicago-based duo use piano, synths and vocals to craft an experimental sound that incorporates ambient, drone and neo-classical styles. While crafting detailed and evocative soundscapes, as per the remit for the genre, Mending have ambitions beyond a purely aesthetic end, as highlighted by their latest release and ongoing project, We Gathered at Wakerobin Hollow.
‘Ambitions’ is an apt word, because We Gathered at Wakerobin Hollow is more than an album. To be released over an 18-month period, the project consists of forty songs split across nine chapters that combine to form a speculative narrative. Beginning in Odena, Alabama, where a fire devastates an oil refinery, the release charts the lives of various characters as they grow from children to adults and eventually spread out across the country, following their own stories. Still, the world impinges on their lives in its strange ways, with a variety personal, public and ecological forces eventually driving them away from homes in Asheville, New York, and Bennington and back to Odena and Wakerobin Hollow.
This month sees the release of the first chapter of the project. Subtitled It All Starts in Odena, these five songs introduce Emma, who appears to be the central protagonist, along with her father Alan and sister Jen, plus friends Julia, Marsha and Jon. The beginning of the story also serves to introduce the Mending sound, which is marked by a sense of weight and poignancy, the melancholic-yet-affirming instrumentation almost conjuring The Antlers’ Hospice.
As the narrative unfolds chronologically, Chapter 01 is understandably concerned with openings. ‘Alan at Emma’s Cradle’ depicts just that, a father not sure he can be what is required of him but determined to try all the same, while ‘Black Soot’ heralds the oil refinery blaze, a portent that some great event is occurring on the horizon. ‘Alan after the Fire’ zooms into the disaster headlong, though the immediacy is offset by a sluggish tempo, as though shock and trauma has numbed the violence of the moment.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3655545199 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=1170515590]
As if to prove its novelistic heft, the closing two songs switch the focus away from the fire and onto Emma’s youth. ‘Emma, Jon, and the Bee Sting’ is a fairly bucolic vision of her younger days, though there is a sense of danger and loss hanging over the scene both through the bee sting of the title and the risk of someone leaving. This continues into the adolescence of ‘Nicholas Quarry, the ordinary scene of teenage risk and rebellion shot through with a sense of natural wonder and happenstance, as highlighted by an encounter with a doe in the final verse.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3655545199 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4055759340]
The close is appropriate in that it captures the Mending aesthetic, a close engagement with both the highs and lows that serve to jab and jolt us into remembering how we are alive. Ultimately, this sense of awe is what marks the first chapter, and the ambition to explore it so profoundly and patiently seems to be Mending’s unique talent.
The first chapter of We Gathered at Wakerobin Hollow is out now and available from the Mending Bandcamp page, and the next chapters will be released on a bi-monthly basis.
