by Adam Brill
Like many of you, I’m probably most often listening to music through two little plastic buds jammed into each ear walking down the street. It seems a given that this way of listening is not optimal. But, beyond the price or fidelity of these particular technologies, such a way of listening to music does something very specific to our relationship with the sound itself. The distance between the sound and your ears is compressed. The sound no longer has any relationship to the space around you. It’s almost as if you’re forgoing space all together to just merely blast sound as directly into your ear drum as possible. Music feels different and sounds different when it is allowed to breathe. For a long time, music was heavily influenced by the church (I’m here referring to the literal building). If you listen to music in a large cathedral, the music sounds quite different. The sounds are allowed to flow and echo throughout the church’s various architectural cavities and crannies. There is even space for the sound to get lost and to transform between the performer’s voice and your ear.
Alvin Lucier composed a famous piece called “i am sitting in a room” which calls attention to the process whereby the physical space in which the music is created radically alters the sound itself. Lucier narrates the process where he will speak until “the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.” The wording here is spot on to call attention to the literal destruction of the sound via the room’s frequencies reinforcing themselves. But, basically all this fancy talk is merely a way of calling attention to the phenomenon commonly known as “reverb.” Reverb is the sonic effect produced when sound is able to build up and decay by being absorbed by the surrounding space or object. Although it is frequently produced digitally, rather than organically, reverb calls attention to the spatial component of music production. It emphasizes the important relationship that sound and space have to each other. And, perhaps most importantly, reverb stretches out sonic frequencies in a way which allows the listener’s ears to flow and rest in the melodies in unique ways.
Cindy Lee, a project of Woman front person Patrick Flegel, has become known for their anarchic sway between harsh noise, dream pop, synth pop, and neoclassical. Somehow Flegel always manages to emulsify these disparate sounds into a coherent whole. The sounds never seem to sit comfortably together and yet, it tells a sonic narrative when you take it in as a whole. Their newest album “Cat O’ Nine Tails” (available for digital purchase via GeoCities’s website) is their most enjoyable distillation of this approach. It features a three part suite, in which Flegel performs some wild instrumentals which invoke the speed and virtuosity of one of Paganini’s Caprices but with an utterly psychedelic organ echo. Flegel follows these up with some more placid instrumentals or one of the album’s two absolutely gorgeous ballads.
Considering how distant and reverb laden the album sounds, it’s kind of a shock how simultaneously intimate and personal it feels. The first track I heard from the album was i Don’t want to fall in love again. This simple ballad calls to mind dozens of pop melodies I’ve heard throughout the years, but the reverb drenched guitars and vocals is what really blew my mind about this track. It sounds like you’re eavesdropping on someone’s practice session through an open window. There’s something tremendously fragile and vulnerable about the vocal delivery that cuts through the iciness of the guitar tones and deeply affected me my first few listens. The instruments themselves have a remarkably clean tone, but the echoey recording style allows the surrounding space to swallow these tones as they loop into each other. All of this creates a gorgeous maelstrom that induces chills. Each moment on this album feels thrilling yet firmly rooted in accessible pop sensibilities. Flegel clearly has a mastery of melody and riffing and he uses it as a homebase for the album’s more chaotic sections. Cindy Lee’s album is full of unorthodox recording choices like this which creates for a wild unpredictable ride that’s somehow both so familiar and yet completely unlike anything I’ve heard. I felt a different person by the time the synthy drum beat at the end of “Bondage of the Mind” faded away, and yet I went right back to the wavering synth instrumental that starts the album as I couldn’t wait to take this journey again and again.