CD digipak with a line of dots in clear varnish on the cover.
Made at home between 2000 and 2004. Small sounds, tiny war machines, mistakes, hair, spit, lucky licks and yes, songs. The very songs we wish to escape from. Songs escaping from themselves, escaping to an escape. Veda and Christof wrote little songs, recorded them, and then fussed around until they became other. An organization of those little voices that distract, that you listen for, that you attempt to cultivate or bat away. Songs escaped.
REVIEWS
• Globe and Mail (June 27, 2009, R4), review by Carl Wilson.
The record is called Escape Songs, and for five years it nearly got clean away. In 2004, Vancouver’s Veda Hille and Christof Migone, then a Montrealer, released an album of bumps and squeaks that for a minute here and there coalesce into pop tunes, then break down again into sputters and mumbles. It’s a stubbornly mysterious record: Listening to it is like peering through a keyhole into a locked 17th-century curiosity cabinet. And so few people heard it that you could ask, like the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial forest, whether it even made a sound. But this week, for the first time, it’s generating a verifiable public din. At the initiative of the month-long Suoni Per Il Popolo music festival in Montreal and the Music Gallery in Toronto, Hille and Migone are giving Escape Songs its live-performance debut. The original project was a departure for both its creators, but particularly for Hille, who for 16 years has been playing and recording songs that, however they meander, never quite break the shackles of music, for a modestly sized but devoted following. Her latest album, This Riot Life, made the long list for last year’s Polaris Music Prize.
After overcoming her intimidation upon meeting Migone at Vancouver’s Western Front artists’ centre in 1998, where he was “the coolest person I’d ever seen – seriously,” she invited him to make tape loops that added some atmospheric accents to her next album. For Escape Songs, she wanted to return the favour by reaching out into Migone’s more habitual sound-art territory. Not that anyone has ever accused Hille of being a conventional songwriter, with her piano- and guitar-based songs that proceed by leaps of faith from philosophical reflection to ecstatic exclamation, from folkie lilt to car-crash violence. In subject matter, they range from cellular regeneration and poisonous plants to lunatic asylums and the life of Emily Carr, not to mention birds, Bertolt Brecht and, as she has put it, “the constant threat of tragedy.” But unlike Migone, Hille has never done a piece that involved pounding a microphone against a wall over and over until it caves in, then playing back the sound from a speaker nestled inside the hole. Neither has she made music by editing together recordings of people cracking their knuckles, knees and toes, or expelling gas, or other semi-voluntary processes on the barely-there bodily plane.
After years of creating one of the world’s only weekly experimental-sound radio shows on a campus-community radio station in Montreal, Migone got his PhD at New York University and is now a lecturer at the University of Toronto and director of the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga. Yet the gap between their two aesthetic worlds is not as wide as it might seem. After a performance years ago, someone told Migone he could call his approach “tinycore.” “I like that,” he says. “A hardcore of the infinitesimal.”
And Hille’s songs too have always been marked by an attraction to smallness rather than grandeur, a scale of reality underneath the one where everyday things are seen or stated. A Junior Scientist microscope played a prominent role in Hille’s intellectual formation, not to mention a stint in art school. So, in a sense, here were two tinycore artists coming together. The record was created slowly, with each writing on their own at their opposite ends of the country and then arranging yearly get-togethers between 2000 and 2003. “While one might guess that the roles were very distinct given our respective track records, it was quite the opposite,” says Migone. “I played some instruments and contributed some lyrics, Veda provided some sound textures. We recorded raw material together and apart; we manipulated and mixed together and apart. We tried to keep it tenuous and sparse.” “I really don’t consider it to be a music album,” says Hille, “and I wondered whether I would still know what was ‘good.’ I found that I did know what was working and what wasn’t, and Christof and I almost always agreed. Which is kind of amazing, in retrospect.” “It was great for me to break out of my usual form,” she adds, “but we kept a little tiny song element in there so it was a change for him too.”
Migone, for his part, says he’s “always been interested in melody, (dis)harmony, and specifically as they manifest themselves in song. Actually, more ‘singsong’ than song – the strands of musicality that escape the formal realm of songmaking/crafting/writing and permeate everyday speech.” Some artists, such as Montreal’s René Lussier or, more recently, Toronto’s Charles Spearin (of Broken Social Scene) with his “Happiness Project,” have explored that realm by composing music based on the cadences of ordinary conversations, which Migone says he likes. But “for me it was more about getting into a tiny place inside me, a place pre-language, a small nothing below the tongue. … In exploring the sonorities of my voice, I find that a singsong often arises, little moments that could add up to a song if I had such skill or propensity … but then I realized that capturing that pre-song state could be a fruitful avenue.”
Thus, on Escape Songs, there are passages that sound like someone talking to him- or herself, which through repetition begin to free-fall into a hummable tune until they disperse into another set of sighs and smacks, as if stumbling from an exterior social world into some antechamber of disease or dream. While they briefly considered playing the results live at the time, Migone says, “I wasn’t too keen on being on stage with a laptop – I’m still not – plus being in different cities and both of us busy with other projects made this a bit of a ‘sleeper’ release.” That elusiveness was exaggerated by the CD’s distribution (in a beige sleeve dotted with a few drops of varnish) on Migone’s own sound-art record label with a name not even printable in this newspaper.
But since the Montreal festival and the Toronto art-music space made the invitation this year, Hille “twisted Christof’s arm” and they invited some musical guests to help flesh out the ghostly originals. “I think the structure we’ve devised will help mitigate my discomfort,” Migone says, joking that the live show could be titled “Escape Escape Songs.” “The challenge and inevitable awkwardness of trying to translate such an intimate record on stage appeals to me.”
• Discorder CITR magazine (June 2004), review by Chris Walters.
Imagine escaping from everything. What do you think you would hear? In Migone and Hille’s case, they find music in a natural, organic form, without all of the re-recording. Escape Songs is a progression of sonic experiments. Find the beauty in the mistakes.
• Sands-zine (13-12-2004), review (in Italian) by Sergio Eletto.
La semplicità, lo scorrere fluido e rilassato degli eventi, i tratti somatici fuggenti rendono Escape Songs un disco importante e capace di mettere d’accordo un po’ tutti. Cristof Migone e Veda Hille battezzano un lavoro, fin dalla confezione, scarno nelle informazioni e astratto nei contenuti. L’astrazione deve essere intesa come il lato positivo dell’opera, per intero sospesa e contesa tra sensazioni, esteticamente opposte, ma complementari per la piena riuscita finale. Tutto si spiega nella contrapposizione del background dei rispettivi musicisti. Migone, (s)manipolatore elettronico attirato dalle microwave di Steve Roden e Bernhard Günter, con la Hille, differente in un passato accademico maturato, nel corso del tempo, con linguaggi di ricerca. Il titolo, canzoni che fuggono, mostra una spina dorsale fugace e spensierata e, se ciò può indurre ad una certa noncuranza dei due nell’assemblare i vari materiali, il complesso risultato finale mostra l’opposto. Escape Songs è un disco articolato come non pochi, un lavoro tinto allo stesso tempo da tradizioni folk ed elettro-acustica, da disturbi(ni) glitch e da sprazzi di musica contemporanea, dalla ripetizione minimalista dei suoni e dall’uso intimista della voce, dai pacthworks concreti e dall’uso di melodie velatamente pop(peggianti). Un alone domestico racchiude tutto un operato che ha visto i due registrare i vari materiali nelle rispettive camere (l’intimità e la solitudine lasciano una loro personale scia durante tutto il tragitto) e, anche se il termine lo-fi non calza a pennello, mi piace immaginare il mood dei due legato a quella estetica del DIY, dal piglio semplice e artigianale. La voce (in fondo “Escape Songs” è un disco di canzoni, anche quando a mancare è la diretta interessata) della Hille a tratti cammina, ansima: più che cantare, preferisce procedere con andamento recitato (Sympathectomy, una stupenda ballata, si adatta al caso). Quando spetta, più raramente, a Migone fare sfoggio di ciò, lo vediamo cimentarsi nel creare intricati giochi ultra-minimali: loop vocali scarni e sussurrati sorretti dalla ripetizione lenta di uno stesso termine o parola; facile preda durante l’ascolto di Lick. Per quanto riguarda la musica: da sotto si odono echi di pianoforte (la prima traccia senza titolo fa tuffare nelle melodie sognanti dell’universo di Luciano Cilio), suoni grattugiati e granulari, pulsazioni acute fuoriuscite dal basso, voci trattate, alchimie strumentali e strumenti inconsueti e inventati, echi e risonanze di (probabili) corde, tirate e percosse, andamenti tratteggiati, suoni smussati e levigati sezionati in micro particelle, lirismi pianistici surreali, suoni striduli e sghembi, cut up(paggi) radiofonici, scampoli di ambient, paesaggi notturni e riflessivi… La dimestichezza nell’edificare un complesso emozionale, così vasto e compatto nell’intersecazione delle varie forme musicali, nasconde una buona dose d’improvvisazione, almeno questo è il sentore che si percepisce in più di un frangente. Se, di recente, avete apprezzato le minuziose diavolerie di Sawako, le ballate nordiche dei The Iditarod, gli inconsueti assemblaggi percussivi di Un Caddie Reversé Dans L’Herbe, il primo glitch di Oval e Mouse On Mars, i riscoperti stati di coscienza di Luciano Cilio (ancora lui) e le varie textures di Roden e compagnia, Escape Songs, come accennato in partenza, riuscirà a cullarvi con l’ascolto in un unico blocco di tutte queste cose, in meno di un’ora.
