Natalia Beylis’ last album, Mermaids, was maybe one of the five or six best records of 2023 in any genre. A watery excursion into deep ambience and DIY experimentalism made using a vintage CRB electric keyboard, it pulled memorable and emotionally charged threads out of a comparatively minimal weave, like library music from an undersea world. Lost – For Annie – recorded as an accompaniment to a 2023 exhibition by artist Annie Hogg – is in many ways a very different recording, made using very different methods, but the results are similarly, unexpectedly moving.
Beylis has always been an experimentalist at heart and Lost – For Annie represents her deepest immersion yet into the realms of sound art, field recording and musique concrete. The album’s first side is taken up entirely by the near-twenty-minute title track, which begins with a subtle ambient wash and some background birdsong. The mood changes as a voice intones the words ‘blackbird alarm note’, and the birdsong modifies itself accordingly. In that one small shift, Beylis establishes a tension between the natural world and its human interlopers; she is not ignorant of the fact that that tension extends even to the people making and recording these sounds. She is an interloper in the wilderness, aware of her privileged position as a chronicler.
The natural habitat in question is Drumnadubber in Co. Leitrim, Ireland, an area of commercial woodland which was clear-felled and then replanted. Beylis made use of field recordings made years apart, at different stages of wildness and human interference. The middle section of the recording is oddly haunting: just the sound of Beylis walking through a birdless landscape before she is joined by chopped and warped voices reading out the names of birds that have disappeared due to human inactivity. But the piece represents not only destruction but also regeneration: there is a tentative hope that curls at the edges of the final minutes, after the sounds of deforestation, after the birdsong is silenced.
The record’s second side is thematically a very different affair, though it remains centred on Leitrim, Beylis’ home for the last eighteen years. It chronicles the historical importance of the county’s sweathouses, small stone structures used for curative sweating for hundreds of years. The first piece is made up of interviews with participants in the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, a community-focused archaeological initiative. These interviews, conducted in the field, are extraordinarily illuminating and serve as a reminder of the importance of particularity and peculiarity when it comes to thinking about history.
There follows a short interlude of half a minute where Beylis’ collaborator Kate Murtagh Sheridan plays a sculpture she created as part of the ‘Monumental Healing’ project: it’s scratchy and tactile, in sharp contrast to the album’s final composition, The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace the Stone, a deep, resonant drone recorded straight after Beylis spent some time in a sweathouse, which captures the combination of strangeness and tranquillity that defines the mystique of these alluring little buildings.
Natalia Beylis is an artist uncommonly in tune with the physicality of her surroundings – that much is obvious from the intimate and sympathetic qualities of her recordings. She is also, however, extremely attuned to the politics and history of these landscapes and aware of the need to both celebrate and nurture the unique parts of our culture. Lost – For Annie contains pertinent examples of all of these qualities. Sound art is – perhaps by its nature – a cerebral practice, but in Beylis’ hands, it can also be emotional and bodily, entertaining and educational.
Lost – For Annie (24 May 2024) Outside Time.
Order (Digital/Cassette): https://nataliabeylis.bandcamp.com/album/lost-for-annie
