Sometimes I look at an old map and let my imagination drift to places that once flourished and are now shells. When did the turn from thriving to decay happen? And why? Answers are fleeting, but within fictitious memories, we can become something else. Gretchen Korsmo’s spellbinding Silhouettes, Spires is a momentary treatise on our natural states of impermanence and leans into changing lives.
Rhodes piano repetitions gloss over temporal shifts, pulling hypnotic moments together into a sort of shapeshifting sonic kaleidoscope. Unhurried but focused, the title track etches soft forms into the soil that are strong enough to survive their shifts in the wind. Korsmo’s voice splits the connective tissue down the middle so this music, and in turn our bonds dissolve in steely resonance. Tension still hangs in the space between chord progressions as we hang on to vestiges of past lives, but it’s a welcome, subtle force that eases its grip when we’re ready.
Piano timbres that take me back to my grandparent’s rural church are like sentimental spikes on “Gummy Tendrils” and “The Longest Strongest Looking Toes I Had Ever Seen.” Time doesn’t move but we do. Through echoed shade and hollow, invisible vibrations, lives are shed and memories slink away. Korsmo’s voice is cloud-like and casts shadows throughout Silhouettes, Spires, but it also offers a form of protection against the sharper pains this music and these paths elicit.
Whatever form it takes, Korsmo’s work always engenders an unexpected gravity. Silhouettes, Spires paints in a restrained palette but uses complex emotive layering to fill emptiness with tonic colors. Slow-moving arrangements become submerged in aqueous dronescapes that simply can’t spiral. A steadiness emerges. There is still languidness in droves, but even smothered in sentimentality, it feels good. Time starts again and the page is turned.
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