“There’s a certain duality between nature and simulation” we wrote of Post Moves‘ 2018 album Unison of Motion on Lobby Art, “though one which is collapsing in the contemporary moment.” The recording project of composer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Wenc, Post Moves works within this strange present. The place where past and future meet, and the tumultuous conditions which emerge. With its pedal steel guitar supported by a variety of synths and field recordings, Unison of Motion captured the “enduring sense of the vast American landscape, the sense of promise and nostalgia rolled into one,” but this was subverted by layers of confusion and dread. “Th[e] classic dream is shaped and distorted by technology,” we concluded, “to form a hyperreal present.”
Continuing the balance between improvised guitar and electronic soundscapes, 2020’s No Dignity in Haste continued this exploration of the old and new, presenting an ambiguity capable of pushing beyond simple labels and challenging the potential of “folk” as a musical genre. “An aural collage that combines experimental electronics with finger picked American Primitive,” we called it. Later that year, Wenc released Cut Into Your Own Dimension, a record which delved deeper into this style to conjure “something intangible, [a] synergy of glittering wonder and the sawing ache of something altogether more poignant.” An endlessly inventive combination of curiosity, wonderment and reflection which epitomised the Post Moves aesthetic. A sound clearly rooted within time but somehow able to drift beyond it too.
This sense of transcendence sits at the centre of Heart Music, a brand new Post Moves double album released last week on Where To Now? Records. It is present both in the intention to move beyond traditional conceptions of folk music, and the meditative, almost spiritual form of deep listening such a style encourages. An invitation to sit with conflicts and inconsistencies in order to understand more fully. “Thematically, much of the music (to me) takes on a somewhat ceremonial feeling,” Wenc explains of the record, “and explores the trajectory of exploring intrapersonal contradictions and what it means to navigate a disharmonious public sphere.”
This is achieved, at least in part, by a change of focus. Where previous Post Moves releases have structured themselves around pedal steel, Wenc now places percussion at the heart of the sound. This allows brisk rhythms to replace the pedal steel’s slow meander and with it add a newfound plasticity. See for example, ‘Del Mero Corazón’, with its bed of banjo and Peruvian marimacho that sets a restless tone before morphing to include percussion and vibraphone, eventually becoming one of the most brisk and energetic pieces Post Moves has made to date.
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A sense of perpetual movement on the record lends the potential for change, each track always on the cusp of some new direction, some new form. Wenc is keen to acknowledge this movement as something inherent inside us, from the tangible pulse referenced in the album’s title to more abstract patterns of thoughts and emotions. As he continues:
The title of the album, Heart Music, is in recognition of (jazz percussionist) Milford Graves’s exploration of the internal data, knowledge, and ultimately music that is present within our bodies. More so than on previous albums, I felt myself letting rhythm, intuition, and improvisation guide the work, often resulting in longer form pieces that allows myself (and hopefully the listener) to listen deeply, observing moments of tension and harmony tangled, dependent, and resolved by one another.
In the wrong hands, this mess of intertwined thoughts, themes and musical elements could sound anxious or disquieting, but there’s an elegance to Wenc’s work. While Heart Music presents moments of friction and novelty, in part a mirror of our disordered world, its challenge to the listener is always to take the time to ruminate on such details and arrive at some underlying truth. This is how the ceremonial tone Wenc alludes to establishes itself, the songs like rituals which allow access to the state of deep listening. Take the reverent air of ‘Desert Glyph Coffee Mug’, or the deliberate hush of ‘Going Straight to the Praying Mantis’, two pieces tonally quite different but cut from the same contemplative cloth.
Opener ‘Willka & Phaxsi’, a piece named after characters in the 2018 film Wiñaypacha (one of several nods to motion pictures across the record) shares a similar feeling. It’s a track that burns slowly, despite being the record’s shortest at nearly three minutes, interspersed with pockets of silence almost as rich as the instrumentation which surrounds them. The song comes complete with a video by Ximena Bedoya (who also created the cover art), which somehow expresses this sensation visually in near-abstract footage of a matchstick and flaring flame.
There are other departures from previous Post Moves releases across the record too. One major inclusion is poetry read by Anna Jeters (of Ancient Pools), constituting the closest thing to conventional vocals in the project’s history. Again, the addition of Jeters’s voice has real purpose, introducing what Wenc describes as “both parallel and perpendicular narratives” which push and pull the listener closer to that sense of deep listening.
The sentiment and intention behind Heart Music are perhaps best captured by lead single ‘Always For Pleasure’. What begins as a “typical” Post Moves track (built on pedal steel) soon becomes almost whimsical, caught on dream-like currents, before transforming just beyond the halfway mark. The shift isn’t strictly logical in a rational sense, but it feels right anyway, like following a path that doesn’t just bend but loops and repeats, a celebration of how music (like all great art) needn’t adhere to our oversimplified notions of movement in time and space. It’s a reminder that things are rarely truly linear, and that we, whether in a metaphysical sense or as assemblages of cells and biochemical reactions, are never static. Heart Music celebrates the process of making something new. Rhythm as a line to guide the listener in, movement as an agent of change.
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Heart Music is out now via Where To Now? Records and you can order it from Bandcamp.
