Album Review: Celer - Xièxie
I started walking to work in the late fall, out of
necessity.
The brakes went out in the car that I drove—had been driving
since 2005, and the repairs it needed were entirely too expensive to take on
for something having little to no value, and was barely being held together as
it was.
During this time in our lives, what I had started calling
‘The Year of Silence,’ walking to work has not been an issue, or created much
of an inconvenience for me. I used to come home on my lunch break, but at this
point, it is not imperative that I do so; I can bring my lunch to work, and
find some quiet part of the building to eat it in where, hopefully, no one will
bother me.
We, thankfully, don’t live very far from where either my
wife, or myself, work; for me, it takes roughly 15 minutes to get in the
morning—sometimes a little longer on the way home.
The late fall, and into the beginning of winter, is not the best time to begin walking anywhere,
really, but I found ways to make due with the drastic fluctuations in
temperature—especially in the morning, before the sun rises, when it can be the
most brisk.
At work, when my colleagues express concern over my
walks—the length, the temperature outside, etc.—I tell them I do not mind, and
that I use it as a time for ‘silent reflection.’
Depending on how I’m feeling when someone asks me what kind
of music I listen to, I may tell them that I primarily listen to old John
Coltrane records, rap music from the early 1990s, and ambient droning. I don’t really use my 15 minutes in the morning,
then, again, in the afternoon, as a time of completely silent reflection—I have
been trying to make the best of my walking time by listening to music on a
second-hand iPod that, much like the car I used to drive, is barely being held
together.
Sometimes it’s an album I need to focus on listening to for
review purposes, and other times, it’s something simply to serve as an
enjoyable soundtrack for the walk to or from work.
I’ve found that now, since we are truly in the winter of my
discontent, listening to ambient droning pumping in through my headphones as I
trudge through my neighborhood—especially on mornings when it has either just
finished snowing, or is still
snowing, creates this bizarre feeling that is both comforting, yet unsettling.
*
Will Long, per the very brief bio on his Bandcamp site, is
‘an American artist living in Japan’; on his personal Instagram page, you’ll
find nothing but a steady stream of very dramatic, artistic photographs, taken
with 35mm film; however, you will not find any information about the music he
produces under the moniker Celer.
As I’ve spent the last two weeks, give or take, immersed in
the sprawling new release from Long, Xièxie, which roughly translates from Chinese to English simply as ‘thanks,’ I
was trying to recall how it was that I first became introduced to Long’s
compositions—it turns out it was through a one-off collaborative LP he put
together with the, at the time, like minded composer, Nicholas Burrage (nee
Szczepanik), Here, for now, released in 2015.
That effort lead me
to check out one of Long’s 2015 additional efforts, the charmingly titled How could you believe me when I loved you,
when you know I’ve been a liar all my life, as well as one other release
from the same year, Templehof.
As Celer, Long is
overwhelmingly prolific. In roughly the last three years, he’s put out 10
releases—and not just digital efforts dumped on to Bandcamp; no, everything is
given a proper physical edition as well—mostly CDs, with the occasional LP or
cassette.
Xièxie is an ambitious project for Long—a double album, put together into two
very distinct parts that, in a way, are structured to mirror each other;
together, the record totals over 90 minutes of music, with extravagant physical
editions including silver or black vinyl, along with a double CD set, or two
cassettes.
With the physical
products available in June (a bit of a long time to wait, I know) the digital
version is made up of the anticipated individual mp3s, but what you get when
you buy Xièxie also, smartly,
includes seamless versions of the record—put together in two very lengthy
files, leading one to believe that until the silver vinyl is spinning on my
turntable, these are the intended way to listen.
Xièxie is less of an album that you simply just listen to; it’s more of an
album that you experience—it has a transformative, transcendental power to it
that Long pulls off effortlessly. From the moment it begins with a field
recording, as the album’s true ‘first’ piece slides in underneath it then takes
over, until the very last drone dissolves into the ether, you are at the mercy
of Long, who is, in a sense, holding you captive, in the dense, evocative
atmosphere he’s weaved together.
*
Everything moves faster than we can control.
Days are just flashes, moments are mixed up but burned on film, and all of the
places and times are out of order. If it could only be us, only ours. If it was
ours, if it was us. Sometimes everything goes faster than you can control and
you can't stop, much less understand where you are.
I hesitate to say
that Xièxie is a concept album, but
it is a very self-contained work, with its tone and structure inspired by
Long’s trip to China in 2017. He discusses this, somewhat ambiguously, on the
Bandcamp page for the album, stating that before he left, he bought a phrase
book and dictionary to help get around, but by the end of his travels, the only
word he ever used was “xièxie.”
His reflection on
the trip is quite beautiful, and haunting—much like the music that this trip
wound up inspiring, and throughout Xièxie,
Long does an impressive job of being able to take the evocative imagery of his
travels—including the self-described rainy, foggy, glowing days and nights in
Shanghai and the cacophonic rhythm of the city, to the frenetic blur of
speeding to Hangzhou on a bullet train, and translate it into glacially paced,
stark, and gorgeous pieces of music.
But, of course, the
field recordings included at the beginning of each half to Xièxie assist with immersing you in this world. The album’s opening
track, “From the doorway of the beef noodle shop, shoes on the street in the
rain, outside the karate school,” is, exactly what it sounds like it would
be—setting the tone that is slowly introduced underneath the sound of children
shouting in unison as they begin a karate exercise and the perpetual drizzle of
the rain. Aptly titled, “Rains lit by neon,” the mournful, pensive drones come
rushing in and Long manages to sustain them in the small pattern with which
they oscillate for over 8 minutes.
The length of these
pieces on Xièxie is another thing
worth discussing—as well as the patience you must have with an album like this,
and the kind of “it takes as long as it’s going to take” kind of mindset Long
must possess when composing the, again, aptly titled “For the entirety,” which
spans 21 minutes and change, arriving at the end of the album’s first ‘side’ as
it were; it’s a beyond majestic, swooning kind of piece that is, again,
structured around a minimalistic pattern of changes that swirls, and swirls,
and as it does, it completely envelops you.
Across Xièxie’s seven long form compositions,
Long manages to craft the kind of melancholic, wondrous drones that have an
almost immediate, dizzying, and visceral emotional reaction with you. He spends
the album walking the line between sounds that are hopeful but bittersweet, and
incredibly reflective and somber—sometimes all at once; it’s an album that is
the kind of thing you can, all too easily, become lost in, and the emotional
gravity tethered within these sounds needs to be heard to truly be understood.
Xièxie is available now as a digital download, with pre-orders ongoing in myriad physical formats.
Thank You for this post! I stumbled
ReplyDeleteupon this blog while looking for any informations on this beautiful album. Since reading about what You listen to I knew I'll stay here for longer
Your review is spot-on. I wish I could write as beautifully as you. Good job, sir.
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