Walls magically repaint themselves in your absence. Chairs receive new upholstery, and cat beds receive new occupants. Lights flicker and die out, incrementally replaced by fixtures that appear equal part foreign and fitting. At an unspecified point in the recent past, this house transitioned from being your house to being your parents’ house, without you even realizing. Now, you’re left picking up random items that once held meaning for you, sorting them into bags labeled “stay” and “go.” Memories flitter through your mind, unlocking forgotten corners of your past with each action figure and trading card. God, how did I get so old?
In crafting her recent album Sometimes We Warfare Mountains, Sylvia Haynes nails this experience of flying through a flipbook of deeply sealed memories. Each of the sixteen instrumental pieces on the record introduce a simple yet impactful motif before quickly (generally) exiting stage, making room for the next self-contained ambient environment to enter. While some of these motifs evoke deeply comforting scenes of momentary eternity, others portray the unsettling, discordant, looping patterns of anxiety set off by a particularly traumatic piece of the past. At many moments, Haynes creates sonic landscapes that feel like a more humble version of the type of crescendocore embodied by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. At others, her music follows faithfully in the tradition of musique concrete, a style that places found sounds in an extremely detailed stereo field. In both cases, the sound invites us into the room with Haynes as she stuffs boxes and bags with her belongings, making a move thrown into shadow by a dense cloud of intense emotion.
Check out this heartwarming, bittersweet, and subtly disturbing unpacking of the act of packing up by clicking on the link below!