Spirit Radio: A Light Is Running Along the Ropes
Editions Vaché

With its CD package housed within a handcrafted pouch and accompanied by a small photo card, poem, and acid-soiled ticket (in the limited fifty-copy edition), this Spirit Radio release is as much art object as musical production. That it is so is easily accounted for once the artists responsible for the project are identified: New York duo Tamalyn Miller and Stephen Spera, both long-time practitioners in the sound and visual arts. Miller's installations have been widely exhibited, and she's a member of the Brooklyn-based psych-folk outfit Goddess; previous to this release, Spera issued experimental material on Parvoart, Red Records, Tessellate, and TraceRecordings, and the work he's produced in the Decorative Arts has appeared in Architectural Digest and Art in America and is part of the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The Getty. That the duo's first full-length release as Spirit Radio should include a strong visual dimension comes as no surprise.

Spirit Radio turns out to be a perfect choice of name, considering that the recording takes on the character of phantom transmissions reaching our ears through archaic devices of one kind or another. With Miller's ghostly voice and the creak of her horsehair fiddle emerging within the oceanic swirl generated by Spera's tape loops, samples, guitars, and keyboards, the hallucinatory material alternates between hazy dreamscapes and ambient-drone drift.

Indicative of the album's tone is the opening “A Light is Running Along the Ropes_Copper,” which unfurls in languorous slow-motion for eight dazed minutes. Miller's wordless, multi-layered vocals gently swoop across a thick swamp of guitar, sitar, and piano shadings; the subsequent “Earthbound,” on the other hand, assumes a somewhat song-like form when its chant-like melodies are sung by Miller using lyrics. “Something About Fire” changes things up with a cryptic spoken word performance (the four- or five-year-old narrator says, “I would constantly play one song over and over about a little girl who played with matches and subsequently burned down her house”) and the first prominent presentation of Miller's raw fiddle playing. A Gothic lullaby such as “Always” will have you pulling that worn copy of The Turn of the Screw down from your bookshelf, after which “The Poisoned Knight” undulates queasily like some opium-induced fever dream; don't be surprised either if the woozy utterances of the title “I Took a Long Walk” stay with you long after its last repetition sounds. Three iterations of “A Light is Running Along the Ropes” surface to impart structural cohesiveness to the recording, the last of which, rich in wordless musings, strings, and chiming keys, unspools for an ultra-absorptive fourteen minutes.

April 2018