The recording project of Montreal-based songwriter Alex Stooshinoff, Patient Hands crafts music according to personal truth, be it emotional, spiritual or mystical. Last year we wrote about Stoic, what we described as “a moving and at times surreal collection of songs that takes lived experience and condenses it into a purer form—a tonic for the listener that proves both cathartic and transportive.” Last month saw Stooshinoff return with a brand new record, There Are No Graves Here, on which the aesthetic is only deepened.
“The album title came from a recording that a professor of mine played in class,” Stooshinoff says. “I heard the line ‘there are no graves here,’ and it stuck with me. The idea of ‘no grave’ became a metaphor for feeling like I had no place to bury the past.” The problem was a pertinent one, because Stooshinoff was living in a through a series of traumas. The illness and subsequent death of his mother, the end of a cherished relationship. “The past was constantly alive,” he says, no matter how he attempted to lay it to rest.
There Are No Graves Here was something of a response, if not to excavate some space of rest then to at least provide comfort through the lived experience of grief. “I wanted the song titles to reflect the domestic scenes that dominated my life,” he explains. “I was thinking a lot about caregiving, and laboring for our loved ones.” The theme runs through the record, sometimes manifesting in the most direct manner, with audio recordings of family dinners playing amid the ambient tones. The effect is to ground the emotion of the music in the everyday, the clips capturing the textures of familial love in their most beautiful mundanity. The easy conversation, the small jokes, the clink of cutlery on the plates.
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The songs were composed using a Eurorack modular synthesizer and cassette tape, with improvised acoustic guitar adding extra layers, and their form is indebted to this set-up. “There aren’t any ‘presets’ in a modular system,” Stooshinoff explains. “Rather they are volatile: once you turn off the system or unplug your patch, the sounds are essentially unrepeatable.” There’s a sense of space to the tracks, a natural ebb and flow that conveys a certain ephemerality. From plaintive threnody ‘Your Wife, Your Husband’ and delicate washes of ‘Not Wake Up,’ to the organic sparkle of ‘Moment i’, these are songs of a specific time and place, arising in their unique moment and vanishing just as quickly, preserved on tape by chance.
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This effect comes full circle, informing the style of the songs and also reinforcing the thematic and personal purpose behind them. “This wasn’t a record I ever intended to release,” Stooshinoff admits. “I didn’t create these pieces with the vision of an album in mind. At best they were sketches I made to forget about the contemporaneous moment.” But after putting the songs away for a while, he eventually shared them with his brother, who encouraged him to see the work through. “These pieces are emotional for me because I know what I was feeling when I composed them, but I worried that that wouldn’t translate,” Stooshinoff admits. But, in putting away such concerns, what emerges is a mediation on love, care and grief in its most immediate and intimate form. The fleeting nature of life caught on tape in all of its beauty and sadness.
There Are No Graves Here is out now and available from the Patient Hands Bandcamp page.