North Carolina guitarist Sarah Louise has become a master of manipulation for her new album. She speaks to us about learning a technical language to create a healing sound and of the timbres melodies and harmonies that became the result.
Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars (reviewed here) is Sarah Louise’s second album for Thrill Jockey, coming relatively soon after Deeper Woods, and it is a contrasting piece of work to that album, with layered and manipulated electric guitar being the star of the show and the vocal pieces, although there, are few and swept up in the soundscapes. “In some ways, this is a very different album,” begins Sarah Louise. “I think this one came out of a few different things, but it’s still related to Deeper Woods in the sense that that album was finished and it was a really long term project that I was working on even while I was working on my solo guitar music. So, after that was done, I had this amazing sense of freedom and of having everything tied up in a neat package. It felt like this new beginning where I was unencumbered by this long term project, but also, having engineered most of Deeper Woods myself, I started this album with new technical capabilities. Learning a recording programme was like learning a new musical instrument in a sense and that’s how I treated it on this album. With life inspirations, I was just having fun and experimenting and exploring and really just doing it for myself, until the music started to accumulate and I started thinking of it as a body of work. It also occurred at a time when I had started meditating a lot; like all of my music, this album is still very much related to the land and my relationship with nature.”
As we mention in the album review, Nighttime Birds is essentially an electric guitar and effects album, but, as Sarah Louise mentions, it is somehow still music that feels very organic and closely linked to nature and the outdoors, something that comes across in all of her music. “I have started to think that my life’s purpose is to share my connection with the Earth and hopefully inspire other people to develop a relationship with it,” she considers. “But when it comes to the creative process itself, I try not to put any limitations on it and say ‘this is about this’ or whatever, but I think that because I spend so much of my life in nature, it comes through and it is something that I want to share with other people. The Earth has so many healing properties and it’s something that, when we connect with it, heals parts of us, which is something I feel like I do want to share.”
Although the electric guitar is the star of the show on Nighttime Birds, there are still vocals there, albeit far less prominently than on Deeper Woods. On tracks like ‘Chitin Flight’ they seem to allow the soundscapes to take centre stage. “I wanted the guitar to be the main voice and the main instrument on that track,” she tells us. “I wanted the vocals to be supporting what was happening with the guitar, so it’s cool that comes across. I do love to sing, but it was really nice to flex my instrumental muscles on this one too.” Perhaps in the hands of a less skilful composer, having electric guitar and complex technical equipment as primary instruments could have resulted in overworked sound, but Sarah Louise was careful to leave enough room in there. “I was thinking a lot about new age and ambient music,” she tells us. “I was also thinking that I didn’t want to clutter it and I wanted there to be space for the listener to insert themselves… It would be really cool if somebody used it for meditation or movement or something like that, because I think there is room in there for interacting with it. Also, I love how some of the different timbres that I was able to create were complete melodies for each other, so even though some of it does exist in that ambient world, I still think it’s very melody and harmony driven. In terms of composition, I was able to make decisions in that way, the same as I would with anything else.”
As she says, there are always parallels and relationships in the notes that Sarah Louise creates, be it with an open tuned twelve string acoustic or a computer programme, so does it really matter what instrument she is using to bring this approach across? “Well, I’m starting to think no!”, she laughs. “My background is with a ton of open tunings; every piece on the VDSQ album is in a different tuning that I made up myself. So I think that continually disorienting myself gave me really good training to be able to play any instrument. Because really, how is a guitar in a different tuning any different to a banjo in a banjo tuning or a mandolin in a mandolin tuning? So, I think that has really helped me with how to work with other instruments as well.” And of course, she has gone the other way with Nighttime Birds, as it is all in standard guitar tuning. “It was really freeing in a way, because, although I wasn’t new to standard tuning – it was what I started out on – it had been a while since it had been my focus. It had the same inspirational feeling that any new tuning brings, a feeling of new possibilities, but also, standard tuning is a wonderful and ingenious tuning, and it meant I almost had more control over the harmonies. Open tunings present certain options but also certain limitations and restrictions, which can be very helpful for composing. With this, it was all out of the window and I think it really allowed my compositional tendencies to come out and it allowed me to find all those harmonies that I wanted. It was hugely inspirational.”
Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars is out now on Thrill Jockey
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Photo Credit: Katrina Ohstrom