“I found while I was at the monastery that it was impossible to hide from yourself, and I wanted that to be reflected in what I had started there.” So explained Philadelphia musician and composer Jason Calhoun when we spoke to him about his 2021 album notebook. The release was shaped by a visit to a Trappist cloister to become, as we put it, “uncharacteristically direct, stripped of the shroud of field-recorded fuzz that is present on many previous releases, favouring instead a sense of purity and plain intention.”
Next month sees the release of small circle, a new Jason Calhoun album on Dear Life Records which follows up notebook and subsequent release ben c, this is for you by returning to the sensations experienced at the monastery. Bathed in quiet and lacking the tonal direction of its predecessors, the record works to conjure a sense of spiritual contemplation. Silence not as some absence but rather the fundamental element behind everything. If notebook left little space to hide, then small circle eradicates any cover, forcing Calhoun, and by extension to the listener, to face themselves amid an encompassing quiet and dwell on what they find there.
Opening the record and serving as the lead single, the title track welcomes the listener into this space. A brief introduction of quiet clarity which gives way to swirling static, as though the listener is led onto an elevator and lowered slowly into depths of themselves. The downward journey into this chasm is not as dark as one might expect, Calhoun blending organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation, small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. Meanwhile, the background drone continues unabated, somehow suggestive of the essential force which must exist at the bottom of the descent.
Photo by Ava Mirzadegan, artwork by Ben Lovell