Somewhere Else is the new record from Saapato, the recording project of upstate New York‘s Brendan Principato. Those familiar with Principato’s previous work will have some idea of what to expect. His practice attempts to to capture his surroundings in both time and space, employing what he calls “textural soundscape creation and sound bath performance” to evoke not mere locations but moments within them. Saapato’s Bird Sanctuary EP wove a space for meditation and peace from Principato’s birding trips to Galloway, New Jersey‘s Forsythe Bird Sanctuary, while last year’s Singing House I & II attempted to capture what we described as “the full sonic potential of his childhood home,” conjured from “a petri dish of improvised ambient performance, field recordings, and loops layered or deconstructed and sent whirring through amplifiers into the air.”
But, despite being made with the same ethos and general techniques, the new record offers something of a change of focus. The thick and verdant soundscapes remain, as do Principato’s use of manipulated field recordings and preoccupation with the intersection of place and memory, but the locations called forth are more nebulous. Somewhere Else “is a little different in that the space is not as physical as previous releases,” as we described in our preview of the title track, “though no less real and familiar.”
This style is typified by ‘Fool’s Empyrean’, a slow-moving almost ten-minute piece which rises from the grounded ribbiting of frogs towards an almost transcendental bed of sound. Though as the song unfurls and the environmental elements reappear, any sense of linear progression is diminished. Instead, as the title might suggest, the earthly and the cosmic appear in tandem, which in turn greys the distinction between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the foreign. As Principato describes:
“[This] is a song that seeks to depict a series of intangible yet intimately personal psychic spaces that we all have inside our heads; foggy rooms from our childhoods, familiar smells, misrememberings, dreams, seasons, and routines all blurring together to become our own continuous mental perception of ‘now’.”
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The strange environment which emerges is best described by the album’s title. Somewhere else is an assumedly real place, though one whose only certain feature is that of not being here. A place potentially recognisable but foreign by definition, forever straddling the line between expectation and experience. Somewhere, as ‘This Place Ever Changing’ suggests, which can never be nailed down in the world. No matter where you find yourself wandering, there will always be somewhere else.
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Somewhere Else is out now. Get it digitally from the Saapato Bandcamp page, or grab a cassette tape from Aural Canyon.
