“The main aim of the [EP] was to address society’s forward-thinking nature, to help the listener forget about what’s coming next and focus on what they have right now – something which she refers to as “the never-ending struggle to remain in the present”

Now, Gundersen is back with a full-length album, Aurora, this time incorporating  what the press release calls

“The press forward that exists in spite of (or perhaps even because of) the cycle. It is the change that comes with the breaking of dawn”

You can hear one track right now, the elegaic ‘Waves’, which opens with snowflake-delicate piano before the introduction of strings, which at first appear mournful, but soon reveal themselves to be much more than that, as complex and stirring and beautiful as life itself.

Aurora will be released on the 1st September, and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp. The artwork is by MaryGrace Wolnski.

Cover photo by Nate Embry

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The record opens with ‘the bird’, a song that utilises animal analogies to describe the strange intimate-yet-remote relationship we share with loved ones. “You bring me dead birds and then you go” sings Joseph, “and it sounds like all our lives and it sounds like you do not know me and never will.” The track is both unsettling and comforting in its honesty, facing up to the awful truth that we will always be separate and distinct, even from those we love the most. While this is something that is usually ignored (for the sake of our sanity) or magnified into melodrama (quite probably also for the sake of our sanity), Joseph (paradoxically, I know) lets the listener into her innermost thoughts in a way normally only possible in the strongest, most unflinching of novels.

In this way Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled brings to mind Marilynne Robinson‘s Housekeeping. At various points during the novel the narrator Ruthie finds herself alienated from-/abandoned by her mother and sister and aunt, leaving her alone in the world. Rather than write this as the the usual hard-luck-with-happy-ending Hollywood story, Robinson’s character confronts and travels through confusion and grief and studies them from the other side, coming to appreciate the fragility of human relationships and realise that our desire to maintain them is what makes life so beautiful:

“They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and sooner or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.”  

But before the clarity, Ruthie sees and does a lot of strange things, actions which barely make sense to her or those involved, let alone others around them. You get the impression that the characters are subject to forces larger than themselves, things they are not equipped to understand. With this album, Joseph paints a similar picture by presenting her feelings straight, appreciating their importance without being able to grasp their context, an autobiography that goes beyond superficial times and places. Poetic and strange but never contrived, she appears to be trying to convey something that sits just outside of her view, or else is so large that it is only possible to see a small speck at any given time. What’s more, she seems to realise that what feels vital to her is foreign to others, but, without any other option, strives on regardless, surrendering to a diligent ignorance, a promise to try and to love in a world too detailed and complex to understand.

To write about something so deep requires a skilful balance between the explicit and implicit, lyrical and beautiful yet clear and true. Thankfully, like Marilynne Robinson, Joseph proves more than capable. By knitting together abstract imagery and phrases, she crafts something larger than the sum of its parts, forgoing clear song structure and even good grammar in a way which accentuates the deeply personal feel. “I hear your babys here your babys here your babys hear your babies,” she sings on ‘the blood’, “and the wind will blow and the seed be sown and the made of blood is the only loved.” Every song contains similarly striking language, and Joseph’s voice and melancholy piano make the whole thing creepy in the way that we all secretly think we’re creepy . Take ‘the bone’ for example:

“Under the bird of the prey and black hole made of what will not grow back still and the born of the loved and lost heart hard of stone and mouth of dust you are the bone sticking in my throat”

This is a simple album about things so complicated that it’s almost impossible to put them into words. It’s about those thoughts and feelings that we all experience but never admit, the things that we, be it through etiquette and embarrassment and fear, dare not confess to others or even ourselves. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is an album about people: lonely and loved, corporeal and divine, mortal and terrified yet enduring with a resilient hope that never quite goes out.

You can buy Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled now via Bandcamp (and via Hits the Fan Records).

P.S. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is up for the Scottish Album of the Year award. Joseph has some stiff competition (we really like The Twilight Sad) but gets the nod from us. You can vote too, so head on over to the website before the polls close at midnight tonight to make sure your favourite (*whispers* Kathryn!) lifts the cup.

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The purpose of this sort of music usually falls into one of two categories: to soundtrack (and enhance the power of) a reel of images or to conjure images from thin air, allow the listener to transcend their surroundings. On Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Bing & Ruth do both. If you are watching the world go by from a train window then the album seems to mould to your surroundings, amplifying small details into imagery, transforming your commute into a slice of cinema. If you are lying in bed with your headphones on or strapped to your ergonomic chair in an office cubicle, TWTGA does the reverse, erasing all details and starting afresh, using the ethereal instrumentation to weave delicate but intricate soundscapes. The lack of percussion adds to the beauty, the tracks taking your by the hand and leading you through worlds that are rich and wide and limited only by your imagination.

The thing is, words like ethereal and celestial and transcendental struggle to describe what makes this record so lovely. These grand words are hyperbole and their use chokes the album in a thicket of cliches, the ‘review’ falling flat in the way of a second-hand dream. If you want to know what makes this Bing and Ruth record so lovely, you are going to have to listen.

You can buy the album from the Happy Talk Recordings Bandcamp page.

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Her latest album, Ruins (the first since last year’s The Man Who Died in His Boat), takes the same aesthetic but explores it in a whole new way. On the majority of the songs Harris uses just an upright piano and her voice to create an album of quiet emotional intensity. This gives the album an almost classical feel, like the soundtrack to a tragedy whose characters are lonely and doomed to eternal sorrow. Harris is wonderfully patient (first track ‘Made of Metal’ is almost two minutes of a murmured pulse, a prologue to the rest of the album) and this gives Ruins a wonderful sense of space. The stretches of quiet between the notes feel less like an omission but rather the gaps where the rest of the world gets in (a feeling which is enhanced by the fact that the album was not recorded in a soundproofed studio – more on which in a moment).

The album was recorded in 2011, during a period Harris spent in Aljezur in south-west Portugal, and the sense of this place has left an indelible mark on the music. When not holed up writing and recording, Harris was hiking several miles to the nearest beach, passing through tiny villages and the ruins of old estates. She says that she intended the album to exist as a document of that walk, and what it became to mean both literally and metaphorically. As she puts it, “Failed structures. Living in the remains of love.” This sense of place is reinforced with the inclusion of the incidental sounds captured during recording, snippets of croaking wildlife and beeping microwaves and the spattering rain and rattling wind of a Portuguese storm anchor the music in a time and place. In practice this creates an album of staggering intimacy, as if the songs themselves never actually left the room they were recorded in but seeped into the thick stuccoed walls, only leaching out at midnight when conditions are right or the stars align in some unknown configuration.

The only deviation from this is the final track, ‘Made of Air’, which wasn’t recorded with the others but all the way back in 2004 in the home of Harris’s mother. The song sees a departure sonically as well as temporally, with a return to the familiar shimmering hum of earlier Grouper releases. The title is particularly apt, the song atmospheric in the most literal sense, 11+ minutes of cool and airy instrumentation, like the most serene of dreams.

Ruins an unquestionably sad album, but one which can be soothing if you let it. It’s hushed music that you should play loud, that will fill the room with something almost tangible.

You can buy Ruins right now via Kranky and all good record shops.

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The good news is that Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka are still recording music. They have recently released a new album entitled Mold On Canvas. The bad news is that I’m late to this party and the LPs have already sold out. But don’t let stop you from checking out what proves to be a nuanced, interesting release.

The band describe their new sound as “DIY Shitty Classical”, which I can’t help feeling is a small slice of false modesty. Let’s get it straight that I know next to nothing about classical music, and I’m not particularly interested in its finer points, but I’m struggling to see how anyone could describe this album as “shitty”. Freund explains, “Mold on Canvas” is an exploration of ability… trespassing into the academic or classical music world with an amateur’s guess on pushing the right keys.”

The album opens with ‘Borrowed Mic Test’, which gently buzzes and pulses into life, the cautious wing-beats of the Lejsovka & Freund moniker as it emerges from its chrysalis. After just two and a half minutes this sonic lepidopteran takes flight, as pianos take over and we get our first glimpse of the new “classical” angle. Next up is ‘Hexations’, with its initial jarring slide giving way to some mournful piano. The title track is sad and pretty in all the right ways and ‘From Royal Ave’ shimmers with a warm, droning fuzz, cut through with some really nice strings.

Freund seems to have had a pretty clear picture in mind when composing these pieces, “These pieces are made by and for the view from huge sunroom windows overlooking a wooded ravine.” My advice would be to find yourself a sunroom, or just a wooded ravine (or really anywhere pretty), and let yourself drift off with it.

Mold On Canvas is a sad album, but not ‘sad’ in its usual usage, meaning upsetting or morose, but instead a different sad: a reflective, comforting sad, one almost synonymous with beautiful. I like it a lot, and I think you might too.

You can download it in its entirety via Bark & Hiss

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Romantic Works is, at least in part, centred around his experiences with stage fright and anxiety, with Henson using the album to explore the issues that have blighted his career as a live musician (‘Elevator Song’ is based upon an attack of pre-concert nerves while in a Glasgow lift). However, the stage fright metaphor/allegory is far from obvious or overwhelming, indeed I would have missed it had I not read the feature on Henson from The Independent. For me, on first listening to Romantic Works, the album sounds like the soundtrack to an arty film, in which even the simplest images and actions are melancholic and sad.

Irrespective of ulterior meanings, this is the album’s greatest achievement – how it seems to stand for a normal existence, its for lush and mournful instrumentation supported by field recordings, serving to highlight the beauty and sorrow of normal life. Again, ‘Elevator Song’ is a perfect example of this, with its poignant mood building up to the final recording of an automated voice warning on closing doors, rendering what at first seemed like a dramatic four minutes as something commonplace, a simple event. ‘Field’ uses bird song, ‘Josella’ the starting of a car, and each takes a familiar sound and gives it attention, supports it with traditionally ‘nice’ sounds of piano and cello, allowing it to it seem more important or meaningful. The album is at once tragic and beautiful, sombre and hopeful and lovely.

Of course, you could argue that my interpretation is not all that far from Henson’s intentions, and that fear and anxiety and the desire to run/hide is intrinsically linked with a modern ‘normal existence,’ opening up a whole new set of questions as to why this may be (and whether we have always been this way). It also refreshing and encouraging to see a young musician begin to describe and address these issues, and it nice to think that there is still a chance for artists to operate successfully under such stresses.

You can buy the album, as well as some nice t-shirts designed by the man himself, from Henson’s website, or stream it over at The Guardian.

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‘What’ is taken from Boman’s upcoming release EPII which is out in June via Adrian Recordings in Scandinavia, Happy Death in the rest of Europe and The Control Group in North America. I for one, can’t wait.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Alice Boman, check out her debut EP Skisser, which we featuredlast year.

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The product of this inspiration was released early last month, a solo EP entitled Time Moves Quickly. The record is a departure from the Pacific Northwest folk revival (and therefore from what we’ve come to expect from the Gundersen family), instead offering five beautifully arranged tracks of piano, violin and cello. Gundersen says that the main aim of the record was to address society’s forward-thinking nature, to help the listener forget about what’s coming next and focus on what they have right now – something which she refers to as “the never-ending struggle to remain in the present”.

My current favourite track is ‘Farewell Summer’, which ends with (what sounds like) an old recording of The Public Garden, a poem by Robert Lowell. Have a listen below.

You can buy the EP over at Abby’s Bandcamp page.

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Lyndsie Alguire is currently working on a brand new album, but until then you can download her two albums, After Image and Suspended In Light.

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Skisser (that’s Swedish for ‘Sketches) is to be released by Adrian Recordings on the 22nd May. These are pop songs that use slightly fuzzy guitars and gentle piano alongside crystal clear vocals to produce something that sounds, for lack of a better word (and in an entirely positive sense), old fashioned.

The track below, ‘Waiting’, is the leading track and gives you a good idea of what Alice is aiming for. The label releasing the EP describe it as ‘Billie Holiday for the 2010s, without the jazz’. I’d say it’s Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ without the production and hype. It’s a gentle and fragile and personal, yet also confident and assured. For a home recording, this is exceptionally well done. In an alternate reality this is the summer radio hit.

A second EP is in the pipeline, this time in a studio with members of labelmates This Is Head providing backup. Whether Boman would prefer to elaborate on these ‘sketches’ in her future work remains to be seen. Going on the results here, I find myself hoping not.

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