Late August, early September. Summer lingers into autumn, nights stay
long, cicadas chirp, stars glint in sky, two girls make music; make
music as project, the conceived art-piece idea being to go somewhere
where they know no one, one time, for one month. This leads to a
friend's grandmother's house in Black Mountain, which is, curiously,
at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in North Carolina, this
black and blue bosom of the South cradling them amongst hills and
ridges and harmonies and unfamiliarity as they nestled amidst much
strewn instrumentage, with four tracks of tape-recording action with
which to document their time. One half of this two-headed
project-like project is Mirah, whose solo records and appearances on
Microphones records have her well known by those keeping a close ear
to the ground trodden by that particular brand of idiosyncratic
songsmith currently being brewed by K. The other half being Ginger
Brooks Takahashi, whom Mirah had known all of three months before the
pair came up with the idealist idea of making a record removed from
everyday life — it sounding a lot like something that would test
even the greatest friendship. But the days run like rabbits and who
knows where the time goes and soon a month has passed and there's a
whole bunch of recordings, and plenty of their surroundings' sound in
the songs and intermittent incidentalist bits and pieces that Mirah
and Ginger knocked out in ad-hoc fashion over the month. The
resulting disc is, in compact-digital terms, a short collation: those
chosen for release total 10 songs, eight interludes, and 28 minutes.
The ambling, collagist record keeps memories of the two's time
together like photos sewn into an art-project scrapbook, its pieces
part of a whole, cogent work whilst still managing to stand out from
the context the final product has placed them in. Meaning that whilst
the disc feels like a diary of a time — all daily entries,
moments of rambling philosophizing, and innumerable sketches in
margins — there are still songs from this time that stand alone
as being whole and finished and pure. And, for these moments, you
forget all about the background and conception and concept-record
process and just revel in the glories of hearing Ginger in songstress
mode intoning "Every time you say goodbye you'll hear that trumpet's
blow/ A serenade to the soul all surrounded by the glow" in the midst
of her rapturous "While We Have the Sun," or Mirah quietly crooning
"Invisible stars, sing me to sleep/ Telling secrets, sing me to
sleep" over a nighttime bed of beatbox and crickets and delicate
guitar in "You Were Crying for Love."
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