Accept when
A new record by Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg
Discussed in this post:
Accept When, Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg, compositions, with Davis, alto saxophone, voice, and synthesizers, and Eisenberg, guitar and voice, and drummer Greg Saunier as an additional guest
It’s mid-August, and the summer is rapidly running out. This record is also out of NY, not Chicago, though Caroline Davis has deep ties to the latter city. It’s a beautiful and provocative album for me, provocative of thought on various matters, which have as usual been proliferating in ways that make it hard to polish this post off, but I’ll try now to accomplish that without excessive exasperating elaboration.
The record feels poised between the territories of several genres—which already is very appealing to me. It sounds a bit like an indie record: there are songs with lyrics, as well instrumental tracks featuring what appears to me to be a lot of open improvisation. Sometimes there is obvious and intense attention to sonic detail, with some electronic instruments and effects and studio production magic (in a good way). And there are very adventurous, punk-energy blowout sessions, along with a kind of extreme commitment to acoustic presence in the recording: so the vocals are recorded with lots of detail and not much processing, the guitar likewise capturing lots of string and fret noise, and, most strikingly, for me, Davis’s saxophone is recorded such that we get amazing access to sounds that are not the main pitch emerging from the instrument—breath and reed sounds, valves opening and closing. For me this makes it feel as though we are in a small space with the performers, a fly on the wall for a series of meetings and conversations that are by turns meditative, hypnotic, incantatory, and also raucous gabfests and a healthy dose of screaming.
The phrase describing the album’s origins supplied with it has stayed with me, that it emerged from a “long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space.”
Many of these qualities are on display in the first track, “Attention.”
But I’m going to stop myself from thinking too much about pieces with lyrics that involve improvising musicians and the relation to indie and pop etc., which seems like kind of the obvious road to take.
There is also music that is not like that in any way at all:
Sequins/sequence—the latter word used for programs that can record music and reshuffle it and allow it to be layered or manipulated or looped. As such it seems like a term that evokes abstraction. A “sequence” can be like a motif or a theme or, to use a favorite word of mine from writing, a “chunk” of musical material. In Bach it might be a fugue subject, often just a couple of bars of music that form the basis for everything that follows. But it’s also a vibe—kind of an anti-lyrical stance in music making, as it emphasizes the way parts can be turned around, maybe a touch coldly, mathematically, calculatingly, and arranged to produce power—rather than a lyrical utterance erupting from need and carried through like a speech or oration.
Anyway, this piece strikes me as taking that somewhat cerebral sense of “sequence” and spinning it around until it starts to throw off sparks and shards and break most of the way down from its starting point until the two pick up the shards and bring us back to the starting point. The equal balance of the instruments is interesting to me here: right up in each other’s faces. And I wonder if Davis is playing quietly—whether that is one way we are getting the intensity of the sonic presence of the instrument. Anyway, awesome.
The next tune, “Flounced,” is another favorite, a phantasmagoric lyric, and fearless embrace of singing the word “garment,” and then, out of the blue, a kind of love story: “flounced garment you were wearing / a gown with ruffles and lace— / I’d never seen you like that, / looking at me across the room / we were in.” There is wonderful back and forth between doubled and single singing here—my guess is that this is the two performers singing in unison, rather than a doubling effect. It feels unadorned and authentic. The whole song feels like a decentered lullaby or children’s song. None of the chords are quite straightforward—we’re hanging out in suspensions and gentle polytonality, but all of it feels just a few notches away from naive simplicity. The solo that ends the piece nudges the whole affair spaceward.
[I know I said I wasn’t going to go down pop/indie rabbit holes with respect to the tracks with lyrics—but . . . ok just a little bit: for me a word like “garment”—a kind of anti-lyrical commercial retail word—is here to balance the presence of such an extreme poeticism as “gossamer,” or, for that matter, “flounced.” It might just be the “f” alliteration, but this reminds me of Bon Iver’s “Flume” song, the first song on Justin Vernon’s first record, which he was kind enough to perform once more at Kamala Harris’s Eau Claire rally last week. In a lot of this kind of pointedly non-narrative songwriting, the words and their semi-non-semantic valences carry a lot of the energy in the song. Topic for a future post. Or book. Oh and it turns out that the Bon Iver song also features the word “garment”—coincidence?!]
“Slynx,” like “Sequins” is a duo without singing, about three minutes long (no tracks on this record go beyond five). But this one might be fully improvised: it begins at the soundscape/noise breaking point of the earlier piece and proceeds delightfully from there.
[I had been ready to slip readily past this track but, dammit, no! I remark that it “might be fully improvised”—and does that therefore mean it should be treated as a triviality? That falls into exactly the cultural trap around improvised music that I’m otherwise dedicated to opposing. Just “noodling”? Just “making stuff up”? Yes, by God, that’s the practice at the core of this music, at some level opposed to the control-freak music that otherwise pervades our culture, where every detail is predetermined and executed with extreme precision, where we want concerts to sound just like records, or to show off how much people must have practiced and how their fingers fly around and all that . . . but I will control this outburst, and say a few things about this piece more than that it is improvised, which maybe, probably, it was.
The space the music inhabits seems very important. It feels like we are almost in a closet with these musicians: i.e., there is almost no space. OK, a closet would probably be really uncomfortable. Also because this sounds pretty darn loud—I think it’s hard to make saxophones utter such sounds softly, and the guitar often sounds cranked, although it never sounds like it should be in a stadium instead of a studio apartment.
Neophytes—what does one aim for in listening to music like this? Well, interplay, for sure—ideas being picked up and exchanged and turned over. That’s paramount. So having a sense of the two voices unfolding simultaneously, that’s big. Emotionally—I feel like this is music that is trying to crack things, stir it up. This relates it to punk and other countercultural forms. It can be tricky to be sure of the emotional content of music that eschews most of the gestures that condition expectation, but that is part of the point: let’s dive in, speak in tongues, listen hard to the static and see what emerges. This also creates context for what follows and that’s important too. OK—I’m going to consider myself acquitted of attempted passing-over-too-lightly . . . ]
Then we get to the song that is the most musical-philosophically provocative for me, “Concrete,” and with your indulgence, I’ll use this piece to talk a little bit about another current obsession, the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Here is the not-Mahler:
“Concrete” is the first (and possibly only?) piece that includes Greg Saunier’s drumming. Davis’s saxophone is an atmosphere-creator in the opening, along with siren noises (heard within an apartment?) and other sound effects I have trouble identifying (could be loops of sax noises, or maybe bowed cymbals, or synthesized sounds). From this emerges a melody and chord sequence that matches or surpasses the traditional harmonies and songfulness of “Attention.”
The arrival of this descending chord pattern is—cause for celebration! It reminds me of several uses of material that I might call “atmospheric” or “ambient.”
But first, some palate-cleansing contradictions:
Improvised music sometimes seems to require special technical mastery for legitimacy. But that’s weird because often the right thing to do musically/artistically has nothing to do with technical proficiency on an instrument, and might actually be impeded by it. This might depend on whether the proficiency also includes the ability to throw the training out, rather than being hemmed in by it. I.e., is the proficiency freedom or, at some level, tyranny?
I find myself back at the Hungry Brain Sunday series, where at some moments I thought—these are the most terrifying sounds being uttered in the city at this moment, and the feelings being explored or excavated here are the most profound. And then at other times I thought: the role of “musician” as user of “an instrument” seems basically irrelevant here: what is happening is about the shaping of a group sound, contributions to which could include literally anything. Here’s a clip:
(This is Emily Beisel on bass clarinet and effects, Michael Zerang on drums and percussion, Carol Genetti with voice and effects, and Jim Baker on piano and, in this case, a vintage ARP synthesizer, at the Hungry Brain in Chicago on July 21, 2024.)
I’ve been fascinated with context and transitions in various artistic situations my entire life. I’m fascinated with the way poets in English move between greater and lesser fidelity to formal requirements. My book could be read as a massive footnote to one moment in a play—an effort to recontextualize it in the history of Western literature so as to recognize a power I thought had maybe been missed. I was fascinated with the opening moves recently of Stephan Crump in solo performance and Shai Maestro in quartet: the way they joked or toyed their way into playing, playing first by actually playing around, including with deliberately non-musical gestures toward and with their instruments, rather than creating a formal starting point.
On recordings I’ve been noticing ways various artists use soundscapes, noise, ambient textures to contextualize their work. I think of the beginning of Radiohead’s “The Bends,” and the beginning of Sgt. Pepper, and then there’s the latest version of Twin Peaks, where David Lynch’s sound design and Angelo Badalamenti’s music work together, as in during the opening moments of each episode, where, staring into the fog and wilderness and Laura Palmer’s ghostly face, we hear something like wind or a bowed or malleted cymbal, before the theme song begins:
This kind of thing seems to be what’s happening in the opening of “Concrete.” And despite the triumphant return of traditional harmony after that opening, the lyrics continue the metaphysical impulse of this combination of materials: “There’s a tree at the end of my block / That grows out of the concrete. / There’s a dream in the back of my mind, / I know it will not repeat. / I could scream at the top of the charts / I know I shouldn’t come here.” This is followed by a brilliantly unhinged saxophone solo enhanced by delay and other effects, approaching the sound of humpback whales—amazing.
I have been struggling for some time—a happy struggle—to wrap my mind around the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The rest of the symphony I have been OK with (by which I mean that I feel I can follow it the way I can follow other complex pieces that I don’t have a deep technical knowledge of), but this first movement—though it has simple building blocks, I have found it incredibly difficult to stabilize in my mind, and experience through a consistent act of attention. In the famous live recording by Herbert von Karajan, the first moments are so quiet you have to boost everything to the maximum to catch the under-breath of strings and the harp and muted horns. Then a pastoral theme or a love theme arrives, and then a tormented minor theme that upends it, and then we build to a much bigger restatement of the major.
But as happens several times, we eventually get to a climax of very uncertain character. I have started doing something that I have never done for any classical piece, namely thinking of—cooking up—a narrative (a nonce-narrative?) to give order to this. And what I’ve come up with is this: a day in a city’s life, with the musical climax designating, say, the triumph of a home team, or a joyous political rally, or some other kind of collective joy. OK fine, maybe conjugal bliss at home. I guess it’s as easy to feel this as a personal narrative despite that vastness of the orchestra involved in making the sounds. But I then try to grasp what follows—is the joy undermined by the darkening mood that comes right after? Or it is just the evening wearing on, our focus becoming looser, those left out of the triumph reasserting themselves, a gradual diminishing as the night deepens, until we find ourselves at the almost-lone harp again, again joined by now more-mysterious breaths of strings—the early morning hours of dream-life?—before a new dawn and a return to the innocence of a few minutes ago.
If you’re like me, you’ll find the first three minutes almost unbearably powerful, and want to go on. But the climax I’m talking about comes about 5 minutes in, at the end of the section marked “Etwas frischer.” And right after that is where things get weird and phantasmagoric. I’ll drop you in in the middle of this.
So, the narrative feels oddly helpful, at least for the moment: the incoherence of the music is like the incoherence of an ordinary experience of a day: different phases of consciousness, assertions of sometimes competing or contradictory impulses, desires. Flashes of things, love and anger, boredom, longing, and sometimes satisfactions—all fit into a cycle that keeps repeating until one day it ends.
I’ve kept at a distance from most Mahler scholarship so far, but I know that the very first notes of the harp have been heard as a funeral march or more darkly as a heartbeat weakening and stuttering and portending its end (it certainly sounds like a memento mori when expressed later by the timpani). In the moment I just pointed out, the harp is playing more or less a bass line built from that motif, which then regularized or looped (in a sequence!) takes on a different character and leads us eventually back to the pastoral theme. (BTW, Caroline Davis has a whole other album built around an investigation of rhythms [and rhythmic disorders] of the heart.)
My narrative also helps me kind of do the reverse operation here, and think of that dreaming, pre-dawn section in Mahler as—ambient sound, or atmosphere, or “sound-design,” even as it continues to be notes expressed in ink on staves in measures, even as these can perhaps (maybe!) be heard as chord progressions or extended chromatic suspensions. That’s a relief: I’m certainly more comfortable with this kind of thematic-analytic framework, rather than, you know, a story.
Thinking back to “Concrete”—is this song about anything like this? A couple of metaphors for this music, or the musical impulse more generally? Or is it thinking about abstract and “concrete”—is the tree the abstract improvisation, or dream-life emerging from the apparently static plain of reality? Or can we step back and feel the interaction of the instrumentals and the lyrics more broadly in the album this way?
I’ll end with one more beautiful moment, from “Flounced,” when the unadorned unison duet of two voices drops to one and says, “Yes, one more time. / I like having you on my mind.” Indeed. This is a beautiful and haunting recording, and I hope not the last time that these two will make music together.
