A few days ago, a meme with evergreen top text washed over my transom. It went something like, “I’m no ecologist but this seems bad. When I saw it, it was paired with a nightmare image of a burning oil field, a towering, impenetrable plume of smoke, riding the air up and up and up, a pitch-black tsunami looming, suspended in time like something out of Fury Road – but real, perpetrated by maniacal dullards and genocidal buffoons. Seems bad. But again, that text is evergreen. It could just as easily be paired with a satellite image of the bomb cyclone swirling over a huge chunk of the Midwest and Ontario as I write this, a tight, counterclockwise spiral of cloud, a vengeful climate wraith poised to wreck our shit.
Of course, it’s all just air, really, responding to human intervention, adjusting to both our sudden and long-term destructive impulses, reacting in kind in accordance with ecosystemic standards and practices I only half understand. Seems like there’s a nice reciprocity to it, though. A tit for tat that rewards those of us who push air around constructively. See, for example, Music For Intersecting Planes, a new LP capturing candlelit conjurations from cellist and noisenik Leila Bordreuil and prominent organist Kali Malone – both of whom are currently at the top of their game. By my estimation, Malone is, along with folks like FUJI||||||||||TA and Johanna Orellana, one of our preeminent air pushers. You know, artists who appear to be as interested in both the air making their sounds and the air through which their sounds move as they are in the sounds themselves. Malone’s often longform works are typically majestic meditations that evolve glacially, circling the ecclesiastical. They are austere but lively, rigorous without being stiff.
Bordreuil, on the other hand, cuts a more chaotic figure. Still interested in slowly evolving sounds, Bordreuil is nevertheless happy to disrupt that slow evolution with slashes of feedback or by simply allowing the entropy of the everyday to seep into her recordings. While Malone slowly levitates, drifting toward the cosmos, Bordreuil seems to relish the earthiness of humanity. It’d be a stretch to say these two are complementary opposites, but they certainly complement each other. Theirs is a terrific push-pull chemistry that fosters a frisson of tension throughout Music For Intersecting Planes, lending the LP a certain unpredictability, taking it into places previously unoccupied by either artist. Aesthetically speaking, anyhow.
Always sonically inventive, Music For Intersecting Planes is a feast for drone lovers. Despite crediting only cello and feedback and organ and sine waves, one could imagine the LP employing at least half a dozen varied instruments – pushing air through pipes and bellows, vibrating it with strings – not least among them the flute, whose distinctive voice can be heard (by my savaged ears, anyway) imitated and distorted repeatedly. Throughout, the air is weighty and palpable, forceful. You can feel it in your eardrums.
Though it’s certainly debatable, the subject matter – or maybe vibe is more accurate – of the album feels of a piece with Bordreuil’s recent works like 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire or Not An Elegy. A great one for assessing disaster through sound, Bordreuil has a knack for wordlessly articulating the human cost of traumatic events, whether small (a house fire) or unfathomably large (the COVID-19 pandemic). With no specific event to tie it to, Music For Intersecting Planes hangs in the air like a slo-mo Midwestern tornado siren, issuing a warning, evergreen.
A week or so ago, an EF3 tornado touched down in Michigan, killing four and injuring many more. The earliest incident of this kind on record, witnesses saw the twister suck slabs of ice out of a lake, launching them skyward. I’m no ecologist but that seems bad. Music For Intersecting Planes plays in the background.
