The extensive, multi-authored liner notes of …we return to ground… provide fascinating insights and detail on the album, especially from composer Karen Power. There are aspects that are certainly eye-opening, particularly in revealing some of her sound sources and recording processes. However, I think it’s best to experience the ear-opening world contained within the record blind, as it were. 

In the case of this recording it appears that the process, the marrying of field recordings with live instrumentation, is as interesting as the outcome. Of course, this has been done before, as David Toop outlines in his introductory notes, but when the instrumentation is provided by Quiet Music Ensemble, a group who never seek to impose themselves on their collaborators and source texts but instead espouse an approach of participation, one knows to expect something that will at the very least be considered. 

Power, whose artistic practice has been focused on environmental sound for more than a decade, spent eight years working on this project, composing for and with the Ensemble. Released on the outward-looking San Francisco label Other Minds, the result is three pieces totalling a mammoth 109 minutes. It feels reductive to put these pieces under the microscope and break them down; suffice to say that the three tracks, …we return to ground…, Sonic Pollinators and Instruments of Ice, are distinct, but semi-interlinked in a discreet way. The soundworld created is vivid and immersive, but what becomes an absorbing facet of the album is the mysterious nature of the collaboration between Power and the Ensemble.

Okay, perhaps not so mysterious if you read the liner notes. Even so, the precise nature of that back-and-forth is a point of wonder. What is apparent is how true the group is to their name. In the opening 30-minute-long title track, six minutes elapse before we sense their presence. Diving into the record, one is met with a series of clicks, which carry a satisfying pop when heard through a good set of headphones. They have a physicality, like having your lobes gently flicked. These are accompanied by what sounds like water lapping on a stoney shore, the pops occurring as the water drains back out. It could also be the sound of ice and water combined. It shouldn’t matter. This is a recording that allows the imagination to wander and focus as it may please.

Adding to the sound of water gently churning at its own pace are the faint scratching of strings, which could be those belonging to Quiet Music Ensemble director John Godfrey’s electric guitar, Ilse de Ziah’s cello, or Dan Bodwell’s double bass. Occasionally, other sounds emerge, such as patterns of chirps circling and dancing around each other like a colony of birds, and strange, fizzing frequencies. The environmental sounds subside and the Ensemble tentatively stake their own space, a flickering presence on this crepuscular frontier. Life came from water, and Power’s score allows time and space for the string players of the ensemble to minutely probe their instruments, straining and scratching at them, before de Ziah eventually wrings a long low note with her bow, while Godfrey adds some ghostly shading. Diaphanous wafts of air, the sloshing of waves and the tumultuous chorus of marshland creatures are introduced with the most minimal additional touches from Seán Mac Erlaine and Roddy O’Keefe on brass. 

Dominated by insects
The closing piece, Instruments of Ice, shares an aquatic link with the title track, but sandwiched in between is Sonic Pollinators, which presents a very different world, dominated by insects. The sound of flies in horror movies or thrillers are portents of death, decay and provide a sense of general unease. While their presence on this track heightens the sense of the ominous, the title suggests a force for good. These contrasting ideas are succinctly encapsulated here. 

After its abrupt opening of a bee screaming by one’s ear, Sonic Pollinators unfolds a more relaxing vista of summer meadows alive with the humming of insects and the chirping of grasshoppers. It makes one consider when one last experienced the likes. It feels increasingly rare. 

One can easily get lost in this, and the durational aspect of tracks two and three, which both clock in around the 40-minute mark, place the listener fully in these worlds and highlight Power’s compositional mastery. In her notes, Power says the three pieces have been written for and with Quiet Music Ensemble, but if I can allow my fancy to overtake me it is Sonic Pollinators which feels the most ‘with’, giving the most sense of both parties appearing to operate most in concert at the compositional stage. It’s punctuated twice by sudden spikes of frenzied buzzing, the first build-up accompanied by the ominous bowing of strings, the second featuring the additional presence of Mac Erlaine’s spectral clarinet and a hint of O’Keefe’s trombone. 

Karen Power (Photo: Frida Sjögren)

Sculpted
Where the title track felt amorphous, Sonic Pollinators and Instruments of Ice feel a little more sculpted. On the latter, the slow cracking and ripping of ice gradually increases in pace before cutting in with a sudden plunging into the depths of what could only be a collapsing icebank. It feels like a carefully packaged moment where Power places the listener right into the event to the extent they may feel they are being forcibly pulled along in the wake of this icy mass. It’s a motif that is repeated in the piece as she envelopss us in this sub-aquatic space. 

Both these tracks climax similarly in a long, slow-burning build-up. On Sonic Pollinators, it is led in by the low, sustained bow work of De Ziah, before Power raises the pitch of the bees. The final couple of minutes are flecked by saxophone and rumbling trombone, becoming increasingly shrill before disappearing in an angry swarm. It cuts suddenly to the perhaps unintentionally humorously sound of crickets. It is right to wonder if anyone really is listening. 

The final ten minutes of Instruments of Ice build on an extended series of baleful notes on trombone and saxophone, bolstered by cello and double bass. It reaches a point of distortion before evaporating, leaving just gurgling and, courtesy of O’Keefe’s horn work, the exhausted snort of a beast that’s ready to expire.

As I recommended, it feels best to just dive in and lose yourself. But the liner notes fill in much of what the ears might miss. If this album doesn’t focus the mind on the greater issues of the environment it should at the very least heighten our attention towards our immediate habitation. Nevertheless, …we return to ground… has no need to make any blunt statement. The sound worlds presented on this record of melting ice and insects will remain opaque to only the most dull-witted.

…we return to ground… by Karen Power and the Quiet Music Ensemble is released on Other Mind Records and available on Bandcamp. Visit https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/we-return-to-ground. 

Click on the image below to listen on Bandcamp.