Sarah Louise – Nighttime Birds And Morning Stars
Thrill Jockey – 25 January 2019
Unlike her recent Deeper Woods album, which showcased her prominent vocals and felt like a natural continuation of her work as House and Land with Sally Anne Morgan, guitarist Sarah Louise’s Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars is built around textures recorded live and manipulated from improvised electric six-string guitar lines, yet it arguably feels like her most earthy and magical sounding effort yet. The fact that her electric guitar is tuned to standard notes is also a significant departure for Sarah, in that a key part of her earlier twelve string acoustic work was her use of undisclosed and unorthodox guitar tunings and unusual picking techniques. That’s not to say her playing style is not evident here; on the wonderful ‘Ancient Intelligence’, after a high meandering effect and drone piece subsides, we have three parallel fidgety guitar lines running alongside each other, before the lowest run is left alone to finish the song. The effect is a feeling of some kind of sonic bilocation, of simultaneously flying high while having a nose in the forest floor. The arrangements also let in space to mix with the music and the result is quite spellbinding.
This technique of using sound textures to create juxtaposing distances and dimensions is heard throughout; on ‘Chitin Flight’, Louise’s soaring vocal sounds like it comes from the heavens, while the scrabbling effected guitar lines remind one of some microscopic scientific footage of multiplying cells or microorganisms moving against one another. Elsewhere on ‘Rime’, a shifty percussive guitar beat is made by Sarah’s acoustic twelve-string, the woody resonance of which nicely contradicts the electronic terrain behind it, until it shifts and lengthens into an urgent, coldly shimmering line (neatly evoking the freezing title). This dense storm leads into ‘Swarming at the Threshold’, a blend of several itchy guitar fragments somehow working alongside each other and leaving enough space in the mix. Again, it feels visual, bringing to mind various images, this time something like insects separately bouncing against a light bulb.
As far as comparisons go, Nighttime is a slippery one to consider; it is unfair to closely look at it next to, say, her work on the VDSQ Volume 12 LP, or Field Guide, because the sets are so very different from the ground up, but perhaps one to consider it alongside is Daniel Bachman’s recent The Morning Star album (the wonderful eight-minute closing title track here works well as a parallel with Daniel’s ‘New Moon’, ending The Morning Star), in that it is another project that seeks to and succeeds in challenging and pushing the concept of solo guitar music into a new realm. Even with just that in mind, this album is a triumph, but adding the fact that the music itself is so utterly beautiful, patient and often thrilling, Nighttime is a wonderful achievement that further demonstrates the talent and unique artistic vision of Sarah Louise.
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