By Dan Sorrells
As I listened to the “speculative folk music” of Liz Allbee’s latest solo
album Breath Vessels, I found my thoughts being pulled from Allbee’s
futuristic framing—”an imagining of how collectivity might sound at some
point ahead”—and towards Donna Haraway’s notion of “staying with the
trouble.” In a book bearing that title, Haraway makes it clear that to stay
with the trouble means forging kinship with all manner of things and beings
that share in an ongoing “thick present.” As “mortal critters,” we are all
“entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters,
meanings.”
This sort of entwinement feels central to Allbee’s project on Breath
Vessels, where she’s quick to point out she’s not using “folk” in a
nostalgic sense. Rather, she aims for a music that can encompass the complex
and often contradictory aspects of being an embodied thing in a world that
seems to be splintering, where we are as caught in the tangles of looming
environmental destruction and abounding alienation as we are in virtual seas
of information and cascades of competing realities. Increasingly held apart
by webs that nevertheless bind us tightly together. Breath Vessels isn’t a
post-apocalyptic soundtrack, but there’s more than a little science fiction
in this music cobbled together from the pieces of our fragmenting world.
It’s music that pretends to be from an uncertain future, but can’t help
being thickly present. A bricolage of bodily, digital, and emotional
resonances, it seeks to remind us to feel the deep vibrations running
through all those strands that connect us.
Those vibrations are the heart of the four pieces on Breath Vessels, which
are crafted from self-built instruments, tuning forks, sine waves and
Allbee’s vocals. Nowhere is Allbee’s trumpet found, and the pieces here are
not improvised in execution. Still, Allbee’s improvisatory spirit is within
them, surely in the genesis of the compositions and expressly in the methods
of building her “breath vessels,” which repurpose glass jugs and jars and
parts from “old instruments on eBay, flea markets, metal supply stores,
[and] garden centers” to create protean instruments that hum and wheeze and
reverberate powerfully, if at times imperfectly.
The long opener “Elegy for the Lost at Sea” is an accumulating mass of
deeply resonant foghorn drones that sound not only like an elegy but maybe
also a warning for those who follow. But as the tones slowly begin to layer,
an amniotic warmth seeps in. Every manner of vibrating physical body is
buried in these low drones: woody bass clarinet, thrumming transformers, the
slow draw of a bow across bass string, ancient throat singing, a mother’s
voice in utero. Soon, higher tones and garbled voices emerge in the
interstices between bassy breaths, a peculiar lifeform stirring into
existence. As the piece nears its end, the drones are reduced to the sounds
of respiration, like the slow breathing of the strange new form of life.
The B-side features three very different shorter pieces. On “Pigeons” a
disorienting moiré drone grounds higher accordion-like pitches that converge
and diverge in consonance and dissonance. A spoken word vignette begins: “I
see a woman walking, furtive, through the street. The day is blinding,
brilliant.” “Glottal Stops” is percolating, percussive, again shot through
with a panning submarine drone. As with many things on this album, it’s hard
to know what is organic, what is electronic, what is one imitating the
other. “Solitary Flocks” reprises the narrative thread of “Pigeons,” the
words now sung over a shifting reedy gradient and a pulsing beat. Eventually
the lyrics morph and it’s no longer just the woman walking furtively but all
of us—everyone lost in their own thoughts, seized by their own concerns,
slyly slipping by everyone else in the bright sunny day. Caught up in the
trouble, if not yet staying with it.