Sometimes limitations can be a gateway to otherwise unrealised freedoms. Arbitrary rules and conditions forming a scaffold that allows you to climb to areas previously out of reach. This ethos was adopted by Ithaca-based artist Jason Calhoun (FKA naps) on his new album Jedidiah, the latest in a steady steam of captivating ambient/drone records that consistently reject trends and expectations in favour of a certain purity of intention.
“Lengths were determined by the duration of ten separate field recordings,” Calhoun describes. “From these, the general length and progression were determined, even if the final result did not even include the original recording at all.” The recordings became concept rather than content, acting like vague maps that led him down new paths. As Calhoun puts it “this structure felt like a place to begin.”
But the recordings were more than mere timestamps. Calhoun recorded them on what he describes as “a retreat into nature,” and so Jedidiah consequently became an exploration of humankind’s place in a wider ecosystem, and our place as individuals within the boundless plains of both space and time. “I found myself contemplating the smallness of human age in the context of nature,” Calhoun says. “The joy letting go can bring, and the importance of resisting being swept along by capitalist advancement and destruction.”
A sense of the outdoors is enmeshed throughout Jedidiah. Crunchy footsteps offer the nearest thing the album has to percussion, as on ‘lateral moves’ or the stark and sombre title track, while ‘survey’ is built around the sound of what could either be a scrambling gait or something being stuffed into a backpack. There’s a sense of forward motion too on ‘ego death’, footsteps joined by breaths and sniffs, as if we’re right there, hiking alongside Calhoun. It feels like being invited along on a personal journey, and the glimmering drone that envelops everything adds a poignancy, a sense of wordless rumination on the state of things.
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Jedidiah find Calhoun in a pretty gloomy place, which I suppose is to be expected from an album with song titles including ‘buried where you live’ and ‘you die and that’s it’. Indeed, he writes about this idea of “sad music” in a piece for I Heart Noise. “The sort of sadness that I was thinking of when starting this new record felt greater than myself,” he describes in a line which quite succinctly captures the feeling of the entire record. Like all of Calhoun’s music, Jedidiah focuses on he incidental in order to capture the universal. There’s no central tragedy, no hackneyed narrative. Instead, Calhoun expresses something ingrained and indistinct, a sorrow that’s woven into even the simplest, most mundane moments.
But that’s not to say Jedidiah is morose and sullen. There’s something calming about it, reassuring even, a sense of recognition for the distillation of sensations we’re all familiar with. There’s quiet transcendence too, for example around the middle section of closer ‘fields’. As Calhoun puts in the album’s description: “Those close to me have said that this album is perhaps darker than previous works, and they may be correct. Within this sadness, there is still a hope, a sense of gentle wonder for what the future may bring.”
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Jedidiah is out now on Dear Life Records and available via Bandcamp.