Ascending
The Nunnery's new record
Albums discussed in this post: Ascending, by the Nunnery (available in digital and vinyl)
I have been fascinated with making music in successive layers since I was a teenager working with basic MIDI gear and a C64 computer in high school. Sarah Elstran’s long-running project “The Nunnery” is built around a relative to that technology, allowing her to create music from live loops of her voice or anything else she can record with a microphone (she also uses a device to manipulate the loops, adding effects, changing their pitch, and so on). If this sounds like it might be kind of geeky or cerebral, just listen to the title track from her new record.
At the end of the first side (this album is her first that is available on vinyl), this track is an apt transition from the previous ones, all of which more easily answer to the name of “song.” Here we seem to be letting free a readiness to pursue music untethered from words, that explores timbral possibilities of the human voice, that evokes the chanting hymns of actual convents as well as a more ethereal music of the spheres, evoked by the title.
The next track, “Finding Mystery,” keeps this up, and folds in more elements along with two fine additional musical contributors: Lars-Erik Larson on drums and Eamonn Mclain on cello.
There are repeating words, or syllables, but I can’t make them out. After a couple of minutes of wild layering, of cello as well as voice, we get a kind of cello solo, a rebuild back up to the backbeat. At about 4:40, we get a 32nd subdivision over double time of the original unhurried tempo, and at 5:30 it sounds like we are entering a dubstep or EDM groove briefly before we get back to the starting sonic textures and fade out. For the way this carries my attention I can only think, among recent examples, of Makaya McCraven’s manipulations of live performances, or again Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg’s duo—which also drew me over to Mahler 9. I do keep hearing orchestras forming or almost forming from combinations of cello dubs and voices. This makes me think sometimes of Radiohead in its techno-orchestral phases—which is music that I know a lot better than EDM/techno. I can’t help thinking it would be awesome to hear this/see it played in a really big dance club with a lot of lights and fog.
The next track, “Peaches,” takes us farther in an ASMR direction, with no-reverb close-miked sounds mixed with others in a huge hall. There’s a little xylophone-like figure along with other percussion from Elstran (no drummer here). I can’t make out all the words, but a couple of lines jump out like the one that gets to the title: “closed mouth speechless / lips like peaches.” That we’re in some kind of realm of mixing different senses/different pleasures gets evoked by the sugar in choruses as well, which is also where things end up: in layers of “sugar,” finally grabbing some lower disfiguring samples before the whole thing shuts down.
Then it’s time for the companion to “Finding Mystery,” called “To Stay,” again featuring Larson and Mclain. The lyric here cycles between leaving and staying, or perhaps they are the same thing—in any case, the ending is extended and incredibly rich: the drums stop with about a minute and a half left, then the chord progression stops with a minute left, and the whole things blooms into an orchestral swell, and goes through several more motions before dissolving around her voice.
The final track returns to foregrounded lyrics over an eerie background of denatured voices.
“I’m making space for love instead”—we all can guess pretty easily instead of what.
By the way there’s plenty for us to love about the first half of the record too—it’s just that everything from “Ascending” to this moving finale feels like a continuous motion and that is, at least in the early days of listening to this, what I wanted especially to emphasize for readers.
I’ve drafted quite a bit more, leaping off from this record, about the nature of acoustic and electronic music, and also making my way over to Sean Carey’s new EP, Watercress, but I think I’ll save this for next week as I also take on Stephan Crump’s new trio project, Otherlands, the record release show of which I was lucky enough to catch at New York’s Jazz Gallery last Friday. As well, I’ll mention that, not as the Nunnery, but just as her improvising self, Sarah Elstran will join me for a duo set at Eau Claire’s venue the Lakely tomorrow, Friday the 24th. Scott Burton joins me on guitar first at 7, followed by Elstran at 8:45 or so. This will be two sets of spontaneously composed music, so fasten your seatbelts.
If you want to catch The Nunnery doing this music, she’ll be at the Cloudland Theater in Minneapolis on November 16 at 6:30 pm, and many more places you can find out about via her website.