300 SOUTH by HEART TUB

An album, 2024

A Review

300 South is a genre-warping portrait of a place, a kaleidoscopic sound-ode to the other side of town, the side of junkyards and graffitied trains, abandoned shopping carts and dead motels. But this is not dilapidation tourism. There’s an authority here. A familiarity. “I have outwalked the furthest city light,” writes Robert Frost, “I have looked down the saddest city lane.” These places and these songs seem lived in, listened to, loved. Heart Tub’s at home inside the dark side of America, and at home showing us how much light the dark side holds. 

Just start with “Sunrise at the Junkyard,” the intro track: layers of glittering piano and spare but deep percussion back the most delicate melody. We hear a song stretching in sunlight, catching its first full breath. “Autonomous Shopping Cart” seems to play its subject like an instrument, and “Green-Checkered Floor” sounds like a chorus of coyotes outside town; its vocals pulse with something haunting and wild but are also gentle, full of a tender beauty. 

Other songs see Heart Tub perfecting a kind of electronic folk, Woody Guthrie channeled through stuttering beats and symphonic synths. “Take Me Down Little Susie” has Guthrie’s live improvisational quality; you can hear the song in real time finding its melody, new harmonies just being born. The jangling tambourines in “The Sun's Spare Change” sound ancient, even Biblical, like something David would play before the Lord. 

This sense of beauty and grandeur is the album’s most impressive quality. At a time when so much IDM or avant guard cultivates the ugly or ironic or grotesque, Heart Tub dares to be sincere, to sound beautiful. There’s nothing malevolent or cartoonish here. Instead, Heart Tub affirms. Listen to how “Bedraggled Sheep” balances its soothing melody with a restless energy to get a sense of this album and this genre at its best. 

William Carlos Williams wrote that his favorite color is weathered blue, reminding us there is something victorious about a thing that stays, that not only endures the storms and years but uses them to polish itself into a new and unseen luster, the luster of experience: old porches, rusty cars, broken windows and scarred lives, lives that are indestructible, pulsing with mystery and dignity and love, and given voice in these hypnotic rhythms and bright melodies. Williams ends his ode to the back streets of America by saying: “No one will believe this of vast import to the nation.” Luckily this album proves him wrong. 

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LINE OF WORK by HEART TUB

Album, 2024

A Review:

Heart Tub’s debut album might be called Line of Work, but what it takes most seriously is play. The first track, “Emperor of Ice Cream,” ushers us into a world of jittery pulsations and jubilant synths. The album finishes with “Maker of the Happiness Prototype,” which sounds like it’s performed by the equipment of a candy factory. And in between we get a whole world of exuberance and sonic exploration, sometimes obliquely joyful, sometimes outrightly so, but always bathed in the jubilance of life itself.

Somewhat like a child contemplating what they’ll be when they grow up, each piece is named after a job. But it’s imagination that’s the real boss here, dreaming up such options as “Bowling Lane Polisher,” “Flytrap Breeder,” and “Professional Laugher.” That last title might best describe the aura of the whole, and it is hard to imagine how Heart Tub could have made these pieces with anything but a giant smile.

This is not to diminish the album’s grandeur or complexity. Each track is a complex tissue of furtive tensions and intricate parts, where retro-futuristic rhythms back up a living jungle of electronic beats and loops. Something like what 80s hiphop might sound like if filtered through the sci-fi movies of another planet. Punctuated with home recordings and found-sound artifacts, Line of Work makes music out of things we thought had no music in them: mall cops and stuntwomen, toasters and pawnbrokers. The album’s real gift is awe: a childlike wonder filters the world for us, giving it back its original sacredness.

And it wouldn’t be real sacredness unless it’s tinged at times with what is shadowy and dark. In gentle and lamenting horns “Embalmer” confronts us with the fragility of our own raw material, and “Flies” picks up on this, giving us the scary ecstasy of what decay might sound like to those whom it excites.

What we do not get here is a rebellion against beauty, a rebellion that characterizes so much contemporary avant-garde or electronic music. Heart Tub gives us the opposite, a rebellion against what’s ugly, a refusal to believe that something truly ugly can exist at all. Listening, we see a world we thought was ordinary get transformed into a world that we can’t help but love.

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NEW YEAR

ALBUM, 2024

A Review:

There is a bright but quiet joy pervading New Year, Åkebrand’s seventh album and by far her most pristine. Six tracks offer austere and iridescent soundworlds, silence sculpted into breath made visible. We are reminded that the darkest time of year can also be the brightest; each piece ushers us out of our gray routines into both luscious dark and blinding grace, pure fragrances and pristine air, vespers of shadow and light and space. 

Åkebrand is a composer not just of our chaotic times but also timelessness, and curates in this album an entire catalog of classical forms. The opening, “Blue Shadows in the Snow,” is an electronic étude, full of synths dripping like icicles. “Some Say You Can Hear the Northern Lights” stretches the sonata form into a kind of cosmic mass with stratospheric strings and rumbling synths, which, far from scaring us, calm like a cosmic sea, the sound of stars being born, thin fragile treble notes held in the arms of a resounding bass. 

“Winter Loses its Pages on the Breeze” is Åkebrand at her most playful, channeling Bill Evans in purposefully ramshackle rhythms and polyphonous trills. “New Year,” the best and title track, is like an aria made by silent storm’s slow night-work: the calm accretion, over everything, of incandescence. A world transformed. The healing architecture of the snow. Even its sadness is exalting. On this track, and throughout the album, Åkebrand offers us what Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt have in their different ways, showing how maximal the minimal can be, a quiet midnight sky that would be empty were it not for all those stars.

Ranging from solar storms down to the noiseless rippling waves inside a breath, New Year is a hymn to the vastness of simplicity, to sound itself, and to the silences that sound is made of. For some, ambient music is meant to be played in the background, softening the sharper edges of the everyday. And indeed that’s gift enough. But to only listen to this album in the background would deprive us of perhaps its most essential gift: a bringing to the foreground the beauty of everything. 

“The Warmth Left Inside a Hat” contains the whole album in that phrase: nothing is permanent, yet peace and joy are indestructible. This album is an ode to those moments in our childhood when we were wrapped in scarves and coats, and to the moments when, Lazarus-like, we were uncoiled out of them, tired and cold but loving our mortality, flushed with new reverence for what’s real. 

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RAGE, MUSE

Album, 2023

A REVIEW:

“Like a piece of Baltic amber, Claire Åkebrand’s sixth album shines with primeval light, the long-trapped rapture of the sea itself, of weathered centuries and distant stars. But it is not antique. It is a music for our time, or rather, outside time, where swelling strings mingle with fluttering synths in songs that sound part indie-folk, part avant garde, half-lullaby, half-wild psalm. 

Taking its title from the opening of Homer’s Iliad, Rage, Muse harmonizes our own world-weary moment with the beginning of poetry, with the birth of song itself. The first track, “Take Off Your Shoes,” reminds us that the holiest ground is the ground we’re standing on right now. It’s one of Åkebrand’s best melodies, evoking early Radiohead or a young Bob Dylan. “Noonday Moon” stuns with its belt-it-out vocals, and “Stands a Star” invites us with its hush onto an empty highway, late at night, where we feel both uneasy and consoled. “Car Dealership Balloons of Utah” helps us not to take our rage, or ourselves, too seriously, although it is a seriously beautiful piece, and shows Claire’s range as a musician, a composer of everything from lullabies to classical to avant-garde. 

But perhaps the crown of the album is the folk-tune “Godforsaken Accordion,” the melody of which seems timeless and eternal, not composed so much as snatched out of the air, as they say. The singing is gentle, unpretentious, and yet full of power, a power that is completely effortless. “Teach me how to sing my song,” the chorus goes, but it’s a song that proves there’s nothing more Åkebrand needs to learn. Another gem is “Macbeth’s Lullaby” but it is Prospero that we might think of most throughout the album: his control over the elements, his tenderness and playfulness, his power and his rage. 

And if there’s rage here then it’s mostly latent, the potential for rage; and maybe not quite rage so much as a frenetic joy. The joy of sheer existence, of everything getting to be just as it is: both the natural world (with frequent field recordings of the wind, birds, insects, rain) as well as all our cracked towns. These songs are odes to the neglected and forgotten, hymns to the forlorn, to failed prophets and American backroads, not polished into something better, but celebrated as they are. Intimate and expansive, graceful and stormy, Rage, Muse is an invocation not just to some distant source of beauty, up there in the stars, but to everything that’s beautiful down here, right now.”

Influences:

CURTAINS

ALBUM 2023

LISTEN HERE!

A Review:

In his “Lecture on Nothing” John Cage writes: “What we require is silence, but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Claire Åkebrand’s fifth album lives in the borderland between silence and song, made not of empty space or utter chaos, but of the fire that is the coupling of the two, the music of the sun and stars, cosmic and vast, but present right now as sunlight streaming through the curtains of your room. These songs contain light’s timelessness and calm, its ability to warm and to heal, but also its power and strength. 

For indeed beauty is terrifying. So many of these pieces land on us like the awe-filled hush that rolls through a cathedral when the organ stops, each one a shard of the one source, a fragment of the absolute. But still, “We need not fear these silences,” Cage continues: “we may love them.” In this sense, Åkebrand’s Curtains teaches us to love what is, how to transform the familiar without changing it; to translate all things into beauty by the heart. 

The first song, “Levitate (For Isaak),” starts with somber but vibrant piano notes floating over a calm ocean of strings. Snippets of Mozart float to the surface, stretch, linger, and crest like waves. All of life’s chief currents are here, from sudden tugs of passion to the quietest modulations of joy. In “Falling Just to Feel Fall’s Cadences,” a synth gets stretched out like a slide guitar over a blooming background of almost inaudible breath. Most of the album is in this register. But “Turning and Turning in Dusk’s Blue Dress” introduces new sounds, periodic pings and chimes, and “Trapped Wasp” is full of buzzes and snaps. Whatever the mode, something constant lies always concealed, something unnamable. Some hint of beauty’s indestructibility. Its sheer ongoingness. 

More than in her previous albums, the piano takes center stage, unfolding clear melodic lines wrapped up in warm staticky hums. The ghost of Bill Evans is here, of Satie, but mixed with the Moonlight Sonata, then remixed with the moonlight itself, all while being utterly modern. Åkebrand is comfortable in her time, and gives us the ancient melodies in sprung rhythms and hazy synths, the stormy choir of the digital age whispering its ode to joy. 

But to say that joy is the album’s main mode is not to accuse it of naivete. To insist on happiness is to see clear-eyed the horrors of life. It is to make a choice. In Adam Zagajewskii’s celebrated poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” he reminds us to “Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered.” This is not an argument or an idea. Like these songs, it is a direct experience of being, the rapture of existence itself. Akebrand’s music convinces us that Cage was right: we need not fear these silences, or our lives. We may love them. Even light through a set of ordinary curtains can be—already is—some reason for assent, some occasion for hope, some avowal of being.

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WEIMAR FROM THE AUTOBAHN

ALBUM, 2023

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“Somewhere, inside those trees, beyond the hills, there is a place you cannot reach, and yet is yours. Soft piano notes drift towards the road. A 90’s neon light tinges the castles and the hills. Seductive, frightening, that place is childhood, and memory. It’s Weimar from the Autobahn, Claire Åkebrand’s fourth album, music from a paradise that’s not quite lost, a place of nightclub synths and forest fugues, where sopranos share the stage with TV ads, and city noises quote snippets of poems. 

But this album is no miscellany. The unity achieved here is that age-old harmony of classical and romantic, modern and medieval. In “Collioure at Thirteen” a single concertina coils like engine smoke over the cobblestones. In “Frogspawn Song” the whole Black Forest hums an aria. And songs like “Rilke in the Strobe Light” seem to mock, though lovingly, the very techno rhythms that transfix us.

As the title suggests, we are living in two worlds here. Or trying to catch a glimpse of one while speeding through another. Speeding where? Into adulthood maybe, or at least the world of teenage angst, those years of power chords and thrumming bass, of dance clubs and Doc Marten boots. But like those boots, this album goes with everything: a church mass or a march down Schillerstrasse, a midnight concert or a hike under the lindens. 

Whether playful or afraid, antique or avant-garde, each song feels fed as if from ancient springs. The last track, “Still Waiting for Mom’s Red Station Wagon,” is one of the most poignant pieces in Åkebrand’s catalog, and rings out like a perfect steeple bell: its few spare piano notes and watery distortions hold a beauty that will never die. We wait and wait. Everyone else got picked up long ago. Day turns to evening, and the first star whispers: Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. We may be restless, even afraid. The hills might curl with shadows and fog. But we have hope. Soon lights will appear, and warmth, and peace. Soon what we’ve been waiting for will come.” 

COLOSSAL WRECK

Album, 2023

A review:

Akebrand’s third album is a tribute to the American desert, and to the desert places inside each of us: the deadly winds and healing rains, the flash fears and flash blooms. This is the music forged in the furnace of the world, and of the heart, a land where sweeps of synth scatter percussive storms, where the air creaks with the weight of the whole sky’s light. 

The first song, “American Wildflowers,” begins with the howling of a lone coyote, drops of rain, and vocals warped by heat, or by time itself. In “Harmony Borax Works” a lonely erhu and pickaxe drums attest to human horror and nobility. Alien but intimate, melodies throughout the album drift as if out of a door some trickster god left open long ago. The title track itself hums with the pulse of years, of stars, evoking Baskinski’s “Disintegration Loops.” It is the song the light sings as it floods the earth, and it’s the hymn the earth, in gratitude, in fear, sings back. 

And more than in her previous albums, there is a wildness here, hazards and threats that frighten and enchant: cougars growling from the shadows, lizards hissing like mad prophets, drums that hammer silence into gold. The ruins of a grand and cracked design, Colossal Wreck reminds us of what God either abandoned or adored so much that he worked raw: the sand dunes’ rumpled drapery, or saguaros stranded in their ancient game of chess.  

You’ll hear folk songs floating through mesquite trees, angry fugues, Beethoven coming from a jukebox that’s half melted in the sun. But for all its scorched extremity, this is not the valley of death, and its healing waters are no mirage. This place is part of life, a land we visit for a time, and then leave somehow healed by, tinged with a thirst that never leaves, and with our own wild places waking in our bones. The final moments of the album ring with laughter, with a childlike peace, but one weighed down with all the lone and level sands that we’ve traversed, the whole world’s primal harmony, that wild cosmic fire with which–we know now–all things burn.

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THE INSOMNIAC’S SONGBOOK

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ALBUM, 2023

“If an abandoned chapel started whispering snippets of organ song and prayer that seeped for centuries into the stones; if all the paintings and the stained glass then joined in; if all the trees around the church began to click and hum, and weird birds splashed in silver pools, and mushrooms puffed their spores into the air; and if the stars then whispered back, sharing their secrets, secrets of light, of time, of the beginning and end, and of the vast spaces between; if this hushed symphony, this dialogue of earth and sky, light years and pine, beauty and fear, if it all harmonized into one sound, that sound would be something like The Insomniac’s Songbook. 

And where are you, the listener? You’re up late, eavesdropping, hearing the secret music of the world singing to itself. In ‘Copper Moonrise,’ piano notes flit past like moths. In ‘Sickbed,’ synths murmur like water underground and then rise up in clear cold springs. Throughout it all, plucked strings stir silence into psalms, while common time is sometimes kept, and sometimes looped, distorted, bent. 

Part lullaby, part liturgy; label it ambient or avant-garde, Åkebrand’s second album has the wildness of nature and the peace of home. Ethereal drones evoke places both cosmic and personal, a big bang slowed and stretched into a space of thrums and sighs. And the history of music is here too: Satie gliding through darkness like a lynx. Or Bach, playing somewhere beyond the moon. 

These are the songs Keats would have made if he’d had a synthesizer; the sounds Frost heard drift from those lovely, dark, deep woods through falling snow; the soundtrack to a Zen monastery designed by Paul Klee. It’s said that Orpheus’ music made stones weep, streams pause, trees bend a little closer to hear more. In The Insomniac’s Songbook Åkebrand lets us hear the stones and streams and trees themselves sing back, the gratitude of earth and air, the cosmos tuning up its strings. Gently frightening, constantly changing and yet unified, a music made by the cracking of ice, the creaking of boughs, the silence of shadow and light. Yes, you are up, and cannot sleep. Dawn may be far away. But never has the night been so alive. Never has insomnia sounded so good.”

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Laughing Out Loud

Album, 2022

“An ancient seascape near an abandoned highway; dark Swedish pines sifting the light; a ghost town where Alice in Wonderland covers Woody Guthrie— Laughing Out Loud is all of these and more. A single guitar and lush unaffected vocals spark from each other intimate campfires as well as vast flames of sound: melodies that tinge modernity with the dust of Troy; lyrics of sensory richness, wry humor, and passionate feeling; a voice that gilds the mundane with the mythical, ranging from oaky whispers to full-throated awe. Some listeners will hear the urgency of Leonard Cohen’s psalms; others the weary beauty of Mazzy Star. But no comparison will fully evoke Åkebrand’s creation, a genre all her own: postmodern lullabies, experimental folk songs, ballads of anguish and joy. A painter, poet, and novelist, Åkebrand gives us a pastoral fantasy that knows shadow and decay, that is attracted to dreams, but suspicious of them too, that teaches us to love a world it refuses to prettify. Folding the past into the present with confident casualness, layered with fragments, echoes, and collage, this album is a luminous meeting of the traditional with the avant-garde, of land and sea, shadow and light, sorrow and joy.”

Check out THE INSOMNIAC’S SONGBOOK influences here!