Close Quarters by whait

LE168

whait is more eaze and Wendy Eisenberg.

more eaze is the project of Brooklyn-based sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice. Ranging from ambient pop to deconstructed sound collage, her numerous solo and collaborative releases weave mundane, everyday sounds, acoustic orchestration and instrumentation, and electronics into adventurous textural compositions. Her music explores themes of intimacy, yearning, and the transformation of abstract feeling into intense living through sound design that moves seamlessly between the banal and the ethereal. She has recently released work with Longform Editions, Leaving Records, Ecstatic, and Orange Milk with forthcoming releases on Thrill Jockey and 15 love. Her work as a string arranger, pedal steel player, and producer has recently been featured on recordings by Martha Skye Murphy, Water Damage, Lomelda, Fashion Club, Claire Rousay, Space Afrika and Rainy Miller, and Nick Zanca amongst others. She regularly performs in the duos Pink Must (w/ Lynn Avery) and whait (w/ Wendy Eisenberg).

Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who plays guitar, tenor banjo, synthesiser, bass and voice. Their work tries to demystify and then immediately, subconsciously re-mystify what a guitar can do within and around songs, and as such is about memory, perception, and love. In addition to their genre-agnostic solo work, they are a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, Editrix, Squanderers (with Kramer and David Grubbs), Darlin (with Ryan Sawyer and Lester St Louis), and work closely with Caroline Davis, John Zorn, and more eaze. They are an Assistant Professor of songwriting, music theory, guitar, and other such overlaps at The New School, and have published essays about music and other things in Sound American, Arcana, and the Contemporary Music Review.

Artist notes:
Closer Quarters is a piece that we designed together initially as a sort of etude. The banjo plays a series of chords in a single position that alter a few notes chromatically every few minutes while the guitar responds by gradually increasing rhythmic complexity against the banjo's constant quarter note pulse. The title also reflects the fact that Wendy and I live together and are in love. The music maintains this sense of constancy even though there is continuous change and development that reveals itself both subtly and in more grand contexts with the additional arrangements we composed for this recording. The additional instrumentation follows a similar additive process as the banjo/guitar movement with new instruments gradually leaking through the constant pulse and a sung text slowly revealing meaning in chunks. As we wrote and recorded this piece, we were also watching Mad Men (my first viewing and Wendy's second) and encountered a tweet that we misremembered as saying “I'm having a Mad Men summer (historical events keep happening but I'm just living my life)” and somehow that description feels apt for this piece. Things keep changing but the constant pulse and drone of connection carries through.

As time has passed since my last Longform Editions piece, my relationship to longform pieces of music has grown immensely. To me, duration is crucial to how i express myself musically and creatively and the impact of experiencing a piece of music as a singular composition that develops over time is more important than ever in a time where the rest of the world trends towards immediacy. – more eaze

We titled closer quarters together as a little pun on quarter notes and cohabitation. Mari wrote more explicitly on our composition process in her notes, so I’ll cover the text I sing, which is interspersed throughout the piece in fragments. On my desk sits Shelley Frisch’s translation of Kafka’s Zürau aphorisms, edited with commentary by Reiner Stach. When I’m stuck on some musical or existential problem, I’ll open up the book and read what comes up. When we were starting to record the vocal arrangement of this piece, I was thinking about how the only words in Morton Feldman’s Three Voices are from Frank O’Hara’s poem Wind, and how the rhythm of the poem twists into the magic of that long journey. I opened the book of aphorisms to try to find something to twist out, and found this:

“Sensual love misleads us about heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but because it unknowingly has within it the elements of heavenly love, it can.”

Something about that weird ice floe in the middle – “it could not do so alone” – which seems to set ‘sensual’ and ‘heavenly’ love in a committed romantic relationship with each other, hooked me in first. Second, that perfect, singable rhythm of the last bit – “but/because/it/unknowingly/has/within/it/the elements/of/heavenly/love/it/can” – so bouncy! The clincher for me: the fact that both sensual and heavenly love are essentials for longform romantic love. The aphorism may be ‘about’ how great sex has within it something heavenly that convinces you you are in ‘actual love’, but after some great sensual love, how could you not a little bit, ‘unknowingly’, believe that? One kind of love is kind of a vessel for the other, just as the quarter note makes possible the superimposition and the subdivision alike, just as the banjo and the guitar constantly foil each other (in our piece, as in life) – and all the rest of our arrangements and orchestration stem from that similar urge, to adorn and make explicit the heavenliness of the music and life we sense, and make, and are.

Longform music grows in my appreciation the older I get because of how explicitly it deals with the deceptions of linear time. Its miracles: feeling yourself, in a single piece, emerge from one sonic plane to another; marking the passage of time not through song breaks (stanzaic) but through the mysterious editing process the mind performs when it is also trying to keep up with what’s around it (epic); not having to reach into your pocket for a device to change the track. I like how in longer pieces the form is not so explicit about itself, most of the time; you have to trust that the form will keep forming. I like how it feels to be in one world for more than four minutes or whatever. Mostly, I like that it literally takes your time. – Wendy Eisenberg

mari: banjo, violin, pedal steel, field recordings
Wendy: guitars, vocals, bass
Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering

more eaze is the project of composer/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice rubio.