The Chicago avant-garde is a complex organism, a kind of self-seeding plant whose flowers are glorious and varied and bloom all year round. The vast roster of musicians attached in some way or other to the International Anthem label are the sap that runs through the organism’s vessels. Collaboratively and individually, they have been responsible for some of the vital experimental releases of recent years, to the extent that International Anthem can now be thought of less as a record label and more as a movement. Lately, Macie Stewart has been moving towards the centre of that movement, providing strings for IA favourites Damon Locks and Makaya McCraven, while also lending her talents to SZA, Alabaster DePlume and Japanese Breakfast.
The very definition of multi-talented, Stewart sings, composes, arranges, improvises, and plays more instruments than it’s decent to list in a review. Her work leans heavily on jazz, skirts the outer edges of folk and pop, gatecrashes contemporary composition, usurps the conventional expectations of rock. Her 2022 debut, Mouth Full of Glass, had an outward chamber-folk prettiness that in no way detracted from the serious, jazzy explorations at the heart of each song. She proves – like Wendy Eisenberg or Julia Holter – that you can have the best of both worlds: music that stirs the heart and exercises the brain.
When the Distance is Blue, her International Anthem debut, feels even more cerebral, more improvisational, and more rooted in landscape. None of which should be surprising, considering IA’s history of experimentation and the fact that Stewart was directly influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She leans much more heavily into longer-form soundscapes, often foregoing vocals in favour of field recordings. Opening track I Forget How To Remember My Dreams (featuring Lia Kohl’s cello), seems to discover its own nascent melody on the fly. All of these pieces create distinctive moods, and in this one, there is a feeling of emergence, an initial unsteadiness that makes way for a growing confidence as a simple piano motif grows stronger, finds its feet, becomes definitive.
Solnit’s book is punctuated by a series of chapters on the colour blue, and similarly, blue infiltrates Stewart’s album. Colour becomes music in a deeply felt, synaesthetic transition. Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New equates blueness with new life and with constant change. It begins with a clatter of prepared piano, becomes pensive and strung-out, and then quietly exploratory. It seems to echo a passage in Solnit’s book about the strange, beautiful emergence of butterflies from their chrysalises. Movement – between places or between emotional and physical states – is a key theme, and it is given the sheen of veracity by Stewart, who includes field recordings of locations as diverse as Paris and Osaka.
Of course, movement presupposes leaving something behind, which is a kind of loss. Loss seems to permeate a number of these tracks: Stairwell (Before and After) is haunted by its own minimalism, its own series of echoes and retreats. There are wordless vocals at the edges, a riddle of a piano melody which invites and then renounces memory. Murmuration/Memorization plays with similar ideas but in a more dramatic, maximalist setting, with Stewart heading up a droning, sweeping string quartet. It’s a far cry from the more tightly structured songs of her first album.
What Fills You Up Won’t Leave an Empty Cup offers a more condensed journey, its piano notes falling like water and the vocalisations chiding like birds, before a series of long bass notes appear, meditative pools in the musical landscape. Closing track, Disintegration, is graceful with strings, muted and strangely moving. Writing about Yves Klein’s obsessions, Rebecca Solnit speculates on the link between the colour blue and the idea of disappearance. She discusses Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Arthur Cravan, both of whom disappeared, literally ‘into the blue’, and Klein’s own urge to disappear. Some of that urge is palpable in Macie Stewart’s music. She seems at times to disappear into her own work, to vanish into vast swathes of colour, expanses of physical space or negated memory. For Matisse, blue was a symbol of distance, but Stewart is always drawn back by the human aspect, and it is, in part, this tension that makes her music so compelling. For all the meditativeness and all the improvisation, there is a single-minded artistry at work behind these pieces.
When the Distance is Blue (March 21st, 2025) International Anthem
Bandcamp: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/when-the-distance-is-blue
