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.
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