What’s baby’s first noise? Is it a cry? A scream? A coo? For New Haven-based musician Sam Moth, on the opener to her new recording pupa, “baby’s first noise” is a foghorn-like drone that plunges into rich distortion, then bursts into a screech of noise like an old modem losing its mind, all of it lurching along to a drumbeat that accelerates from ominous to frenetic in the space of three minutes.
What’s perhaps most notable about “baby’s first noise” is that it doesn’t prepare you, at all, for the rest of pupa. Though in another sense, it does.
In the second song, “Rootless,” a gentle organ pulsing out a simple chord progression, sometimes pushed along by sparse percussion, is a springboard for a choir of overdubbed voices. “I have been waiting / I’ve been alone,” the voices sing. “I have been searching for a soul to match my own.” Then, like “baby’s first noise,” except with a completely different musical palette, the voices all flutter off in their own directions, unexpected, surprising, and yet still harmonious.
Where could pupa go from here? As it turns out, into electronica. If “baby’s first noise” and “Rootless” define the borders of the musical landscape Sam Moth intends to cover on pupa, the next two songs drive a skittering path straight down the middle of it. The rhythm bed is all shifting urgency; the voice is a languid, jazzy, just-behind-the-beat affair, recorded almost as if it has been sampled from something else — until, on “a new addition,” pupa’s final number, the voices layer again, as they did on “Rootless,” with the same emotional effect. That song brakes to a tantalizing ending, as the voice and drums drop off a cliff into a silence and a burbling calliope begins to rise, only to be cut off mid-phrase. We’ll never hear the end.
This short recording project is thus true to its title, as pupa really does suggest an artist in a prolific period of incubation and development. The results themselves are certainly intriguing enough on their own. But this reviewer finds himself looking very much forward to the recording project that comes next, too — and to the live show on one of New Haven’s stages, where Sam Moth is already spreading her wings.
