No way around it, Sun Kil Moon is folk, a part of a new
Americana that includes Fleet Foxes and Lord Huron. Then there are artists who
can't be genred. Bowie comes to mind. We
flip through the catalog to find folk (Space Oddity, Hunky Dory), heavy metal
(Tin Men, The Man Who Sold the World), Funk (Station to Station, Young
Americans), pop (Let's Dance) and hard edged avant-garde (Blackstar, The Next
Day). Sufjan Stevens fits the mold as well. One never knows what to expect
next, the discography like looking at a dozen artists. From the folky Carrie & Lowell to the vaudevillian Illinois. Sufjan’s latest project is Planetarium, a
side project that includes Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner and James McAlister. While
it contains the lyrical style associated with Stevens, the music itself was in
the hands of the "supergroup" with Nico Muhly at the helm.
You probably found Sufjan on your own, and Bryce Dessner’s
The National has received critical acclaim for years, but Nico Muhly may have
slipped by. Even as a Sufjan fan, with all its baroque overtones, avant-garde
classical may be too far reaching; Nico Muhly is far from accessible. I first
stumbled upon Muhly in 2009 with Mothertongue.
The LP in particular, sounds like the product of someone in love with language.
Voices are treated as exquisite instruments (the click of the teeth, the tap
of the tongue, the smack of the lips, etc.) The music itself speaks to
deeper meanings and specific ideas and emotions, like words on a page. It's an
in your face LP that without the proper context could remind one of a composer
child, one all gungho and "let me at 'em", knocking things over in his
enthusiasm to get to the controls. Dismiss that context. This isn't the work of
a child, but a young genius.
Muhly says of his work, "After the intense corporeal experience of The Only Tune (which deals with the body exclusively: its two hundred and six bones, its skin, its hair), I wanted to turn my attention inwards to the body's memory bank: all of the things we can remember without searching. I tested myself and managed to write down two pages filled with numbers, addresses, the names of the states, the capitals of the countries in West Africa (surprisingly), friends' phone numbers in other countries, a social security number, my mother's old, old studio number from the mid 80's. The result of this is 'Mothertongue' the song, which mimics this process of discovering all the codes and numbers that make up my - and Abigail Fischer, the singer's - personal archaeology. 'Mothertongue' is in four movements: the first engages the singer with all her addresses and ways to remember English grammar. The second takes place in a shower and at the breakfast table, and features an introspective and congested twitching and muttering. The third section (entitled 'hress,' the Icelandic word for being over-excited and stupidly joyful) is manic, frisky, and eager to please; this spirals into a violent, ecstatic recitation of addresses and zip codes antagonized by a 'monster' made out of over-amplified cereal and synthesizers."
