\\ Where Tremble Heart //
By John Melillo & Cecyl Ruehlen
**All Sounds Composed, Recorded, Performed & Engineered By J & C
Produced For Double CD Book + Digital By
UNSILENT DESERT PRESS / Arizona USA / 2022
UDP No. 010
OFFICAL RELEASE :
unsilentdesertpress.bandcamp.com
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Digital Download Comes With 21 Page PDF Liner Notes Book
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"Where Tremble Heart is an album of distances. Distances crossed and uncrossed. Entanglements time-traveled. Embodied and speculated spaces. Letters cast and undone. John and I met in Tucson, Arizona in late summer 2019, and quickly developed a highly collaborative friendship. While we didn’t meet until our late 30s, a humorous and provoking caveat is that John and I spent our early youth in small, farming towns in western Kansas, less than an hour away from each other. Distances traversed and double under, overlap. Magnetism is a perplexing feeling.
This magnetic album was made far and away from one another’s presence. Or at least each other’s physical body. Generally, John lives part time (and over the last two years, full time) in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I have been living in central Tucson the last few years. I must confess I have struggled with the idea of making an album with others “at a distance”. Sharing files remotely and working out-of-sync can often complicate or draw out a creative project in an unwieldy way. Momentum dissipates, energies dissolve, expectations fall out of alignment. The back and forth can even ruin the endeavor that those involved wished to share between each other.
Concern over an idea or exchange being obliterated by procrastination turns my tendencies towards working in live settings with collaborators. Everything is laid bare, in the moment. We make the work together, in real time, excited through commune-ication with friends – and sometimes strangers. However, something happened in our pursuit of making an album 3,400 miles apart from each other that created an opening where there was an absence. A live-ness where there could have just been longing. And while the compositions that developed over the course of five months shifted inward and grew in emotional and sonic complexity, the process began with sharing wind and water. More specifically the wind and ocean waves of coastal Nova Scotia and the wind and rain of the Sonoran desert of the southwestern United States.
The wind itself is a very different creature in these two locations. The winds of Cape Breton are like a drone; constant and howling; makers of wave song. Their direction tells us of future weather. The desert winds in and around Tucson are intermittent, intense, and focused— downbursts and inversions bracketed by vast silences in the air. The northern, coastal winds rattle every edge of a house, vibrating the wood and glass like a resonant frequency. The southern monsoon winds smash into walls, rip furniture from the ground in a sudden swoop and twist dust storms into neighborhood specific weather phenomena.
In many ways this is a recording of landscapes and our inhabitation of them. Nova Scotia and Southern Arizona are both regions that exhibit micro-climates. They do not have four more or less evenly spread out seasons, and those seasonal attributes can be felt quite differently by crossing over a mountain pass, or leaving one valley or urban subsection and entering another. They both have nuanced changes that do not conform to the linearity and circles of weather that most of the undulating lands between these two regions provide.
Summer in Tucson is strange in its unrelenting heat [sometimes punctuated by] mild late afternoons right in the middle of the season. By early July, monsoon snaps the 115 degree Fahrenheit temperatures like a dying mesquite branch, bringing heavy and scattered clouds on a daily basis that can often drop the temperature down into the 80s. Even with this localized rhythm, one gets caught in the monsoon, it happens across an isolated section of cactus and adobe. The rain, like the wind, pounds downward and then disappears with the pink and orange haze of humid setting suns. The monsoon offers a breath, a break, a gift that sits disjointedly between dangerously dry spells and homogenous blue skies.
John talks to me of stacking wood. Endless wood. Preparing for the cold. Meditating on the darkness and air cutting through bone as the long winter envelops the lowlands and golden beach grass. Pieces of split wood as the saving grace of screaming ice. The waves crash regardless of the chill, a reminder of the salt of life. But these are micro-climates and even in mid-summer the wind and water in a cove on Nova Scotia’s coast can speak of winter’s edge.
Surely this isn’t just a recording about weather, as didactic as that could be. Weather becomes a timbral vessel, we gather sounds inside its chamber, we stir and tumble ourselves around its inner hull. We throw out and pull in sounds that weather us. We share in our psychic climates. John’s gathered wood becomes my fire, my rainy breath becomes his poetic reversals. Or perhaps we are just a heap of tangled electric cables, frustratedly uncertain where one cable ends and another begins. Pulling in various directions to see if any one, single thread can come undone.
There are two CDs here with many threads knotted and unknotted. The first CD has three compositions. The first two tracks are our distanced gathering and shaping of sound. A lettrist folding of inhabited bodies and slowed down thoughts. The third track is a live session from Exploded View, a cinema and art space in downtown Tucson. This track was recorded in mid August 2021, one afternoon during a three day trip John took to Tucson. I imagine that the live recording is akin to us catching up after a couple years of writing back and forth. No pondering, just conversing. The second CD contains four field recordings. Two of them are taken from the thunder filled, monsoon rains of Tucson and two of them from the pulsing waves of Cape Breton. I now wonder which CD is the deconstruction of material and which one is the unification of form."
—Cecyl Ruehlen, December 2021
"Where. We mix the inner and outer in everyday knowing. Dust off the object many thousands of times. See that rock over there? Our houses are always someone else’s.
Our space is a combination of grounds, faces. Conditions pulse through the micro-cosmic, an almost nothing generated in our ears. Sweep the sounds clear across with another pulse. Let’s take little trips outside.
An internal maze opens on the great outdoors. Objective sounds. Walk around in them.
Field recording: not just what's there. Real is fugitive, sound-stillness-shape always beckoning, so we mix and move, curve and curl, get slid through.
Go drift around. There is no field, no cordoned off space, no grid, just little spheres we blow up with microphones. And then they collapse. We are there ourselves for it. But the horizon stays out there, and the waves swell up, enfold, and bend it. The dust collects around it, and it shimmers in the heat. Its blur makes us otherwise. Always just beyond, receding. We are next to each other at this distance, adjacency across continents.
Tremble. So we made a document of missing, a document of absence. No longer what it “is” but another blur between and over, a being-worked-out. Being timbral mixture, intersection of sonic planes. Absence ground out of where some “you” is and where it would be. Make place between locality, between space, through the ambient. Whorl into ambient. Make place not single, indications in the void, between selves, outside, alone and not. Some other noise always there in the sound-in-the-head. Not escape but spiraling.
The reenchantment of the source by sending it away and receiving it again
ritual extended and undone
a toppled pyramid blue in the distance now froth at the shore
We go by letting the landscape say too, not capturing but heeding to the charm—the spell—sounding in the wind. The chant of the moving air already doubled up: the motion of sound waves revealing the motion of moving masses of air as it pushes, grinds against trees, buildings, hills, things.
Heart. Back to this, from this.
Outside’s abstractions. We tape ourselves onto them. Sound’s weight. We want to carry it out. What holds these sounds there is there in us. We want to graft these sounds into our hearts, we record them. Sing them by heart. Frequency scatter, frequency return.
But they are too much for us, still.
Because the some-other-place just now coming into blurring in our hearts carries, too, all the unbearable, unhearable–all the selves, bodies, memories, worlds gone–all the burning, cutting, settling, making, knowing, forgetting, destroying, losing, fucking up: history. Void. The vibrations not gone, not disappeared, just smaller, just accumulating in the floating dust and froth and spit and tangle of this medium, this air. We keep finding and wanting to find a here and its escapes.
Heart. We live in finding and wanting and feeling and so we throw out unsent and sent letters to voids and not-voids, to each other and to the world, to the general generic noise and to our friends, their faces in the landscape, their listening our listening. We hear them hearing there in the general din and so move ourselves out of ourselves just that way and toward them. Not an avoidance of a void but another ear with it, another turn in it now singing together."
– John Melillo, December 2021
released February 28, 2022
