12. MamifferMare Decendrii
I was hesitant to put something that I’d played on onto this list, however, this was one of the most significant life-changes in my existence. I’ve thought a lot about how music has shaped my life: it has determined my course, it has largely shaped who my group of friends are, it has informed my practice as an artist, and it has led to the family that I now have. Faith and I came together because of music, and we now have a child so, quite literally, our son would not have been born if it were not for the music that brought us together.
And the music that brought us together was Faith’s piano playing. I heard a recording that she had made as part of a group called Everlovely Lightningheart who participated in this student exhibition in 2003 or 2004. They had set up this installation and were playing some of the music they had made, and I heard Faith’s piano from the other room and I was like, ‘What is that sound? This is really compelling’. So, I followed the sound into the room, discovered the source and subsequently met Faith and her bandmate Chris. We ended up playing shows with them – Isis and Everlovely Lightningheart. Faith interned for Hydra Head and later she asked me to contribute to the first Mamiffer record and then that led to us living together and so on.
The reason I picked this record is it was also a very pivotal moment in my life. I’d left Los Angeles. I had decided to stop playing in Isis. I was on the brink of severing the partnership with Mark Thompson who ran Hydra Head with me. I moved out to the woods here on Vashon where we live. So, it was this moment when many things changed and part of the soundtrack to all of those changes was listening to Faith compose this record. That was so important and inspiring to me because I’d never been privy to someone else’s compositional process before. At least not to that level. She wrote a lot of this record on piano, and I would be doing whatever I was doing – artwork or dishes or whatever – whilst she was playing this stuff, and I would hear it unfolding and a lot of it was born out of improvisation and then these themes would form, and I would hear her shaping it. And this music, with no hyperbole, touched my soul. To witness it coming into being was really affecting. I got to participate in making the album but only as a support musician. I didn’t have anything to do with the actual composition of the record. When I think back on how my life has changed most significantly in the last 15 years, this record is a huge part of that. I can hear this record even now and it brings all of those moments from that part of my life back very vividly and it’s also a very singular piece of music. I can’t think of anything else that sounds like this record. I’m just grateful to be a witness to it.
Had I never encountered Faith as a person, I think this music would still have had the same impact for me. I knew her music before I knew her and it possessed the same qualities as a lot of this other music that I’ve talked about, where Faith really can only be herself and what comes out of her is very true to who she is as a person and now that I know her and have seen how she writes music, I can testify to that being absolutely the case. She has this very specific idea of how things need to be, and she will follow that idea until it has been realised to the best of her ability.
