The work of musician and composer Jason Calhoun has long reached wide for inspiration and influence. The 2020 album jedidiah retreated into nature. notebook entered a Trappist monastery. ben c, this is for you was rooted in the rhythms and memories of a family home. Others, like small circle, seemed to emerge in the aftermath of previous records, the album unfolding in a post-monastery setting, where the physical visit had long concluded but its air of contemplation still ran deep. Though while the locus of Calhoun’s music shifted from record to record, and indeed the sound itself traversed the full gamut of ambient and drone as a loose genre, a unifying factor always shines through. The sense of an artist on a mission, or else just asking questions. Someone in perpetual search for something elusive, be it mere solace or transcendence.
It could be tempting to view such efforts with pessimism. This prolific artist, releasing record after record, still covering new ground in search of a solution to the problem. Only to assume such a position would be to a) underestimate the achievements of Calhoun’s work to date, and b) misunderstand the reason the search is perpetual in the first place. It is not that there is no answer out there, more the answer needs to be continual. Rarely are we so lucky as to get a blinding light along the road to Damascus. The path to comfort and contentment is more like a thirst to be sated. We must constantly go to the well.
With this in mind, Jason Calhoun’s latest album, revelations of divine love, could be read as both a continuation of his ongoing project and a metacommentary on its purpose. Coming next month via Dear Life Records, the album takes its title from the collected works of Julian of Norwich, using the wisdom of the fourteenth-century anchoress as the catalyst for a meditation on what it means to find contentment. “Julian of Norwich says ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’,” Calhoun explains. “These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them—in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess.” None of these things can flip a switch and change a life, few will necessarily count for much a week or month away, but this steady accumulation of ephemeral moments is what sustains a life. Gives it colour and warmth and, ultimately, meaning.
The result is unsurprisingly intimate, if still shot through with the very sense of restlessness that drives its creation, meaning Calhoun’s picture is far more complex than a simple catalogue of sentimental charms. Consider the latest single ‘what we deserve’. An embodiment of the concision and curiosity which marks the record, the song clocks in barely over a minute yet is pulled in every direction by colourful lines of synths and below that a pounding drum which persists undistracted, ensuring the force of these flourishes is limited. As though for all the small delights we find before ourselves, the beat of something larger will always sound behind us. “‘what we deserve’ is perhaps the most simultaneously playful and relentless I get on this record, Calhoun explains. “The title comes from existential thoughts about daily joys against the backdrop of global politics […] Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is whether we deserve the mess we’re in and whether we’re in it due to our own callow joys.”
Watch the track’s accompanying video, courtesy of Calhoun’s dog and a Go Pro camera:
revelations of divine love will be released on the 7th August via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.
