We featured Jason Calhoun’s naps project (not to be confused with the Florida band of the same name) a lot on Wake the Deaf, saying nice things about releases such as Happy All the Time Forever Always, of which we said “the songs exist as lush swirls of instrumentation, mists and fogs which seep through your ears and line the inside of your head, offering a layer of protection from reality.” The latest naps album, Bask, has been put to tape by the good folk at Lily Tapes & Discs, and we’re pleased to report it follows in its predecessors’ footsteps.
Calhoun’s music is not easy to report, relying as much on atmosphere and texture as it does any kind of traditional musical elements. Describing it feels like talking about a contemporary artwork rather than a record. Bask is intended as a companion piece to Calhoun’s last Lily Tapes release, one hundred percent confident, but this new tape shows a marked stylistic shift. Things are still hazy and indistinct, but in a different way. Gone is the shrouding murk, the dark droning distortion. Instead the tone is bright, the tape dawning slowly across its run-time. As Lily Tapes put it “If confident was the dive down, here we find ourselves resurfacing. It’s sunny out, and there’s plenty of shade but fragments of light still break through, shifting and converging as you drift. They’re bringing something down with them—but don’t worry about what you’re looking for, just let it come into focus.”
Opening track ‘new friend’ is a good introduction, wrapped in a blanket of indistinct fuzz, the drones raindrop soft, rippling in concentric circles as they splash against the background fuzz. ‘anne’ follows a similar blueprint, paradoxically bright and opaque, a sensation that’s best captured by Shaun Hall’s beautiful cover art, like a lamp illuminating the emerald-blue water of a swimming pool or shafts of sun lighting up banks of pillowy cumulus at dawn.
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The title track mixes ambient field recordings with tender drones, the sound of a small-town summer afternoon, gentle traffic and indistinct voices and that sense of quiet sadness that comes with passing time. Perhaps the darkest song on the album, ‘hearing’ sounds like a 3am answerphone message from a long-dead loved one, a voice garbles indecipherable words, pixelated beyond comprehension, conjuring a mix of creeping dread and breathless hope as you reach out across the snowy static in the vain hope of being reunited.
It’s logical then ‘tree 103’ sounds like the morning after, where things have already turned improbable and surreal in the warm daylight, the neighbourhood’s birds chirping to assure you the world is as it was, things seeming sad rather than strange. The album then closes with ‘alxs’, its high-pitched keys fading away into silence.
naps makes DIY ambient music the way the Impressionists made paintings. These little songs, no matter how fleeting and indistinct, invoke emotions that are impossible with traditional guitar and vocals set-ups. Several play-throughs may be required for the desired effect, but when it does take hold you can be sure that you’ll feel a little lighter, a little wiser, a little better.
You can get Bask now on cassette via Lily Tapes & Discs, or digitally via the naps Bandcamp page.
