With vivid details and subtle textures, the latest collaboration between crys cole and James Rushford folds real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams.
crys cole and James Rushford’s music was not made for kitchens or cars. Their work is so subtle that the smallest distraction—the noise from an AC unit, the rumble of a passing truck—threatens to drown out its nuances. The Canadian sound artist and Australian composer, who together record as Ora Clementi, specialize in small, quiet sounds evocative of rustling leaves, rubbed wineglass rims, and humming fluorescent bulbs. Silence the noise around you, and their work opens up a world of vivid and suggestive detail.
cole’s music, both solo and alongside collaborators like Oren Ambarchi, uses contact mics and controlled gestures to unlock a hidden world of vibration in everyday objects. Rushford’s pieces are fuller bodied, but not by much: Mixing electronics, tapes, and acoustic instruments, his compositions fixate upon the most ethereal textures and timbres. He described this year’s Lake From the Louvers, recorded during an artist residency on Lake Geneva, as an attempt to translate the play of light as it bounced off the surface of the water onto the windowpanes of his studio. Even when Rushford works in a more traditional mode, playing pianissimo is his forte: Last year, he released a recording of the modernist Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Musica Callada, a collection of diminutive piano sketches whose title translates as “Silent Music.”
The duo’s debut album as Ora Clementi, 2014’s Cover You Will Softer Me, was stitched together from whispering, crackling, and scraping sounds—manna for any ASMR lover. The music’s flow was so imperceptible that for long stretches, it was possible to wonder if the duo had simply set up microphones in some out-of-the-way space and walked away, allowing the tape to fill with the sounds of a building groaning under its own weight. Their captivating follow-up, Sylva Sylvarum, feels considerably more purposeful, as though its constituent parts were all meant to lead to a kind of epiphany.
The album begins with angelic voices, tinkling bells, and distant birdsong—a soft, glowing efflorescence as beatific as a moment of religious ecstasy. Across 15 tracks, the two musicians avail themselves of a wide array of sounds, atmospheres, and moods, yet all these pieces feel linked by some hidden design. They are held together not only by the musicians’ customary crepitations but also an eerie palette of synthesizers and guitar that are forever rising and falling, perpetually on the verge of slipping out of key—not dissonant exactly, but sour, wilted, enervated.
The shortest tracks are mere sketches. The minute-long “Sirin” runs pitch-bent flute synth through heavy reverb, reveling in the resulting vibrations; “Lathe of Heaven,” not much longer, pairs mournful guitar with choral pads and shrieking birds, almost gothic in its dour, languid movements. Often, a piece might abruptly change shape halfway through: “Umbrella Spinner” begins with bright mallet synths, reminiscent of Visible Cloaks, with a tentative, searching quality; the huffing of breath provides the pulse. But halfway through, the melody falls silent, giving way to more than a minute and a half of clicking sounds, like pebbles in the tide heard from underwater. In the first half, the artists are at their most lyrical; in the second, they cede the stage to purely environmental sound, as though erasing themselves from the frame.
A number of the most substantial tracks contain vocals. Practically as cryptic as their sound pieces, these are almost liturgical in tone, the lyrics neither sung nor spoken but softly chanted, like a church congregation reciting a prayer in unison. The artists have said that all the album’s lyrics are sourced from texts pertaining to utopias and the natural world, and the album’s title comes from a 17th century posthumously released book by Francis Bacon, a kind of miscellany of scientific facts and curiosities. In “Dialogue Between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain,” they assemble a vast panoramic image out of stray shards and fragments—“precious and common stones... minerals and metals”; “wines, oils, and different liquids”; “all the different fish that are found in the rivers, lakes, and seas”; “dragons, worms, insects, flies, and beetles”—that dances in the mind like some ancient mosaic illuminated by flickering candlelight.
The words are difficult to make out; you don’t so much register their meanings as feel the weight of them sinking like stones into your subconscious. The same feeling is true of “Magic Mountain,” the album’s closest thing to an actual song, in which soft, optimistic synth pads serve as a bed for the pair’s sing-song recitation of places of natural wonder: “the Pacific Ocean seafloor... a prehistoric geological site in Colorado… a mountain on the border of North Cascades National Park.” It is unclear what these places may share in common, but the reverence of Ora Clementi’s tone is unmistakable. In moments like this, Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.
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