A certain degree of context is helpful when sitting with bend reality ~ like a wave, the latest record from Austin-based songwriter Matt Kivel. A sense of what has come before. Because if anything has united his shifting, inventive style across the last decade, it is that of an endless search. Something evident in his willingness to blend and blur genre conventions, as though each record was looking for that ideal combination, a sound able to answer a question, or communicate something otherwise incomprehensible. “Kivel’s sound is clearly built upon folk music, although he brings adaptations and flourishes all of his own, as well as employing a cast of over eleven other musicians who each add their own touches and improvisations,” as we wrote of 2016’s janus, typifying his work. “What could have been a relatively simple album is therefore transformed into something else entirely, a nuanced and convoluted synthesis of folk, pop and experimental jazz.”
The albums which followed offered various combinations of such styles, and were no less receptive to influences outside of music too. Janus looked to literature and history, while fires on the plain, inspired by the Kon Ichikawa film of the same name, not only drew from cinema but was structured something like a movie in its own right. A long journey conceptualised, where even guest appearances from the likes of Robin Pecknold and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, which on other records might have stood solely as exciting coups or Easter eggs, had structural and thematic implications. A way for Kivel to introduce new narrators. Small diversions to the main narrative in a technique echoing that of Ichikawa’s film.
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Then came a pair of ambient-based albums—last night in america (Pedro Y El Lobo Records + Cascine) and that day, on the beach (PYL Records)—which leaned toward almost contemporary minimalist tones. But working counter to the meditative calm the genre often entails, last night in america painted a picture of mundane life as soundtracked by anguish and violence, exploring how the bland everyday remained bland despite the terrible things unfolding all around. “Everyone seemed to process this abstract grief so quickly,” Kivel explained at the time. “I wanted to write a record about that. It feels like a very American idea to me—that short memory, or that ability to shrug and submerge terrible feelings.”
And if last night in america asked how we managed to live in peace in spite of everything, then follow-up that day, on the beach was more concerned with whether we can live peacefully at all. Because Matt Kivel no longer wanted to partake in the national (or Western?) burial of grief, held no illusions as to the persistent influence of memories and past trauma. Instead he chose to unearth periods of intense depression throughout his own life, return to them and attempt to map their shapes through music. Therefore, if last night was a quiet protest against a national mindset, then that day was a personal living of the alternative course. A decision to not bury the past but rather submerge oneself within it.
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Each record felt like its own cohesive, complete thing, yet the sense of searching continued. The journey of an individual dissatisfied with their surroundings yet unable to let go of the hope that some better, more hospitable place to call his own might eventually come into view. Recorded after moving back to Austin with his wife, bend reality ~ like a wave might be the closest Kivel has got to such a home. Stripping back the expansive style of the previous records in favour of a more intimate, insular tone, the album references the tranquility found in nature, as well as the pervading unease with messier human landscapes (what the press release calls “a deep, inner pain and grotesque sense of dislocation”), refusing to sugar-coat hard realities without abandoning faith in renewal and growth.
One of the main ways Kivel achieves this sensation is again by inviting others to sing these songs with him. Will Oldham returns on several tracks, a presence Kivel said aims to make the songs “feel more human and holy,” an almost literal reminder that, when they so choose, people can come together to make something good, something beautiful. “Vocal harmony is one of humanity’s purely positive non-destructive powers and I’m glad we could tap into it on this song,” Kivel goes on to explain, concluding the thought with a sentiment that might be said to represent the record as a whole: “The world is gravely ill and this is just a small acknowledgment that we are capable of healing if we want to.”
bend reality ~ like a wave is out now via PYL Records and you can get it from the Matt Kivel Bandcamp page.
