MAY 17, 2021
Earth Bow 
Sarah Louise
Earth Bow  

Sarah Louise is an understated counter-cultural force. Based in rural Appalachia, she forages and makes her own medicinal remedies and performs what she calls “Earth Practices” to deepen her connection to nature. 

She’s intentional about how she uses technology: in a 2019 interview she said that she didn’t use a cellphone, at that point, unless she was on tour. But, noting that the guitar was once a new technology, she isn’t afraid to draw the modern in with the ancient. 

The sounds of Earth Bow, Louise’s ninth record, which she released on April 30th on her new Earth Bow imprint, may or may not come as a surprise depending on where you fall in her listenership. My (admittedly recent) introduction was 2020’s Floating Rhododendron, a relatively straight-ahead collection of instrumental 12-string acoustic guitar pieces, showcasing Louise rich, elegant American Primitivism-style finger-picking. 

Earth Bow has slightly more in common with 2019’s Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars, for which Louise drew from a broader palette. For that self-engineered record she improvised on electric guitar, playing with loops and tone and self-sampling to create an auditory impression of the deep woods. Sometimes it swells to a heavy cosmic drone, then fades into ambient hypnosis, the emotional impact of which writer Nick Yulman compared to time-lapse nature videos. 

Earth Bow, which is eight tracks woven into two fluid suites (with a few single versions included, as well), is similarly cinematic, but offers a sturdier, more folk-based kind of songwriting. Louise uses an SP-404SX to sample from her own compositions, harmonizing with herself and layering electric guitar, synth loops and bird songs into a rumbling hum of jewel-toned textures. 

There are shades of Fairport Convention’s whimsical psychedelic folk, and Soft Machine-style prog-rock. Louise’s regal, slightly wobbling voice reminds me of psych-folk singer-songwriter Linda Perhacs who, when recording her 1970 debut Parallelograms, used abstract drawings to express her musical ideas to her producer. 

Earth Bow strikes me as a similarly inclusive sensory experience. Like her “guiding light,” the late composer and author Pauline Oliveros, Louise is interested in how music impacts nervous systems, and uses meditation to find presence within sound. There is, in other words, some very close attention being paid to the way nature feels as well as the way it sounds. 

Louise’s intentionality lends a seriousness to her music without suffocating it with self-importance. Like steel guitarist Mike Cooper’s 2020 record Playing with Water, which made use of field recordings from locales threatened by climate change, Earth Bow is a love offering and an appeal. As Louise puts it, “I believe if people can first fall in love with nature, they may begin to protect it.”
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Earth Bow is available for purchase here.

MAY 17, 2021
A Softer Focus 
Claire Rousay
American Dreams
 

When being led in the practice of psychic sleep, the practitioner is often instructed to notice surrounding sounds: the rumble of their belly, the buzzing tinnitus in their ears, the slight rasp of breath in their throat. The awareness is slowly expanded to sounds in the room: the soft whooshing of a fan, the pull-string of the blinds flapping in the breeze; and then to sounds outside the room: a bus door opening and closing,  a neighbor singing along with the radio. The point is to achieve some state of “presence,” to be exactly where one is, to notice what’s happening right now. 

Claire Rousay’s approach to her work is not dissimilar. The San Antonio-based artist always tuned into the sounds happening around her and is rarely without a field recorder, which she uses to capture the sounds of her environment. 

“Even just setting up a kind of handheld recorder in the house, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m going to cook something,’” she explained in an April interview with the online magazine Our Culture. “And I’m like, ‘Well, fuck it, I’ll record it too.’ So I’m cooking and then I hear the train go by, and then I hear an ambulance, and it’s like, I can tell how many miles away these things are happening, in terms of like actual distance and almost the radius around my living spaces.”

What you’re reading is, officially, a review of A Softer Focus which Rousay released on April 9, 2021. But she’s hard to keep up with, and even as I was chewing slowly on that record, Bandcamp sent me email notifications about three more: A Collection, an EP called Twin Bed and Now I Am Found, a collaboration with LA-based composer and musician Patrick Shiroishi. Add to that a number of other recent offerings, including “full-length-ish” records, singles, and pieces like “it was always worth it,” which documents the dissolution of a long romantic relationship via love-letters rendered through text to voice. It’s one of Rousay’s tougher listens, for me: the disorienting blend of intimacy and cold technology triggers an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism and alienation. 

But it’s familiar too. Like all of Rousay’s work, a genre described in a New York Times profile as “emo ambient,” there’s a pervasive sense of the kind of emotional vulnerability that seems second nature to those of her in-between generation, people at the cusp of millennial and zoomer. 

Rousay told the Times that she’d never made a listenable record before A Softer Focus, which is highly listenable. As in her other work, Rousay recontextualizes sound into something that is at once oddly familiar and totally foreign, but here it’s swathed in more formal melody and composition. Airy violin and cello and subtly auto-tuned vocals ripple and swell under the sounds of the everyday: a keyboard clicking, a clattering of household objects, windchimes moving in a momentary gust, far-away fireworks. 

For A Softer Focus, Rousay collaborated with fellow San Antonio artist Dani Toral, who designed the sensuous quasi-floral cover art and made a series of ceramic whistles to accompany the record. Sounds of Toral’s process -- sculpting the whistle, playing it, talking about it -- are baked into the record.

A Collection, which is also very good, strikes me as a companion piece to A Softer Focus: it exhibits a side of Rousay’s work that is noisier and, conventionally speaking, less “listenable.” But Rousay’s characteristic sensitivities remain. Listeners might tune in and out as they would the noise of a busy street corner, perhaps barely conscious that they’re nodding along to all of it.

A Softer Focus, in contrast, feels domestic and layered with sounds of home life. As I listen to the record now my own environment builds on and cleaves to the record: there’s a low-flying airplane, the kids from next door running and laughing, birds chattering. Right this minute I’m here for all of it. 
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A Softer Focus is available for purchase here.