Under the moniker Post Moves, composer and interdisciplinary artist Sam Wenc has released a series of records over the last few years, utilising pedal steel, guitar, vibraphone, electronics, percussion and field recordings to create music that sits at the intersection of folk, jazz and spiritual minimalism—a kind of avant-Americana. Most recently he released Heart Music, a double album built on percussion (as opposed to Wenc’s focus on pedal steel) that we said “celebrates the process of making something new. Rhythm as a line to guide the listener in, movement as an agent of change.”
His new album Recall the Dream Breath, out via Moone Records and Lobby Art, might have been released under the slightly different moniker of Post Moves & The Sound Memory Ensemble, but it is still very much his project. Apart from a couple of notable cameos (more on which later), it’s essentially a solo record, the name more of a thematic choice rather than a practical one, as Wenc describes:
“I wanted a listener to perhaps get the feeling that there was a larger group at work. With the album title and name of the ensemble, both have an associated verb/action with them. Both concerning dreams and/or memories, I liked the idea of the music scoring these moments where we cue information culled from dreams/memories as a way of situating ourselves in our present state. The placelessness of memories and their role in us finding place in the present.”
Written almost entirely during pandemic-era lockdowns, Heart Music was a wonderfully dense, knotty affair, built around percussion in a deliberately disordered, thematically complex manner that gave little thought to live performance. But Recall the Dream Breath feels different from the outset. It is stripped back, decluttered, both in terms of the instruments used (pedal steel returns as the main player, along with bass and banjo) and the underlying atmosphere. Intuition and experimentation are still important, but here they are unshackled from the contextual intricacies of the previous record. The result is something freer, a widescreen meandering journey through dreams and memories as a means to better situate the listener in their present.
This is apparent from opener ‘Grief Fields’. Sparse lines of pedal steel are left to wander against a softly quiet backdrop like streaks of dawn cloud. But from the halfway point it begins to gather momentum, the slow beat of percussion heralding the arrival of additional instrumentation that rises in a dramatic crest. This eventually subsides, leaving behind a solitary banjo and a hushed sense of post-storm calm, and with the sense of having been through something and emerged on the other side.
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Whereas Heart Music was created over a year and a half, Recall the Dream Breath was completed quickly, written and recorded in just two weeks in the spring of 2021. The first two tracks, roughly the record’s Side A, were composed in advance, a level of pre-planning that is new to Wenc’s creative process, while the rest were broadly improvised or written during recording. A genuine blend of construction and intuition which allowed him to arrive with a solid base to build upon, and therefore commit more freely to the directions which suggested themselves in the moment.
‘Lorraine’ sees this happen in real time, opening with a composed arrangement and slowly unfurling into improvisation. The sound is accompanied by a poem read by Kyle Field (of Little Wings), one of two central collaborations on the record which further the quasi-imaginary ensemble of the Post Moves & The Sound Memory name. “The oversight available on the high cliff’s crag as the wind must’ve blown a page free,” Field reads, “I am the clairvoyance which can truly at times be hard on a body, letting the web loose, shook with wild breeze on the thought pattern and a focus on no repeating words.” It’s the mood of the record put into words, where dreaminess meets physicality in a way only possible in memories—details, textures, feelings existing within an abstract space.
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The soft pulse drone of ‘The Ladder’s Shadow’ appears foreboding at first but alters as the pedal steel drifts its way in, existing as some large or ancient thing beyond view, before Deerhoof’s John Dieterich joins on ‘Electric Pasture’ with guitars and effects that elevate the track to a soundscape fully worthy of its name. Closer ‘The Suicide Tree’ is perhaps the most cinematic piece on the record, the slow swell of ambient textures and bright specks of strings layered over field recordings of everyday life—children’s voices and the nameless ambience of not-silence that surrounds us always. The final third changes tack, switching to audio from an educational film about trees as the rich atmosphere dims to nothing, replaced with needling drones that buzz and whir like honeybees before clanking and sputtering to a discordant, almost disconcerting, finish.
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Recall the Dream Breath is out now via Moone Records and Lobby Art. Het it now via Bandcamp.
Cover design by Danika Vandersteen