Elk and cello. A hand drum known as a Guda. Bars spat over near-orchestral samples. Throughout the pandemic, musicians and music lovers have turned to that art form to help them get through its hard times, or just pass an afternoon, and in the face of a tumultuous week, New Haven’s music offers both solace and release, sometimes from unlikely places.
New Haven-based musician Laura Wolf cheekily describes her EP Instrumentals and Other Creatures as “the elk mating call and cello mashup that literally no one asked for.” Maybe that’s so, but maybe it’s the mashup we need.
The concept of the EP is simple, as Wolf uses audio samples from Yellowstone Park of elk and bird calls, as well as geyser sounds, as a first move in creating compositional ideas. So on “Elk,” the eerie, gorgeous elk sounds fade into a pulsing, peaceful drone and fluttering lead. As the piece proceeds, it gains urgency — just enough to feel like forward momentum, not so much that it feels rushed about it. “Geyser” gallops along with an anticipation, part nervous, part wondrous. And “Bird” flips the script, as an insistent pulse motors along while a languid cello line floats in the background. If Wolf has been in isolation from other musicians since the pandemic started, her instrumentals suggest that she has found a new collaborator in the sounds she finds around her, and there’s something profound in that.
With Eye Reopened, New Haven-based musician Jim LoPresti writes that he “transcribes [his] own personal experiences and delivers it with existentially haunting tones from the steel hand drum.”
The meditative nature of the entire album may come as a surprise, as percussionist LoPresti writes that he’s “currently in a classic metal band and punk band.” But LoPresti thus reveals a commonality among many musicians — that they listen to and play music from a much broader spectrum than whatever they may do public. With Eye Reopened, like all good drummers, LoPresti gives as much room to the space between the notes as the notes themselves. The opener, “Let’s Begin,” is built on a simple line compelling enough to bear repeating, while “Society Stew” introduces a host of other percussive sounds and bird calls to make a head or two bob. “Mahakala” rocks along on a full drum kit and a synth line that would be at home in the club, while “Cold Moon” has a sparse chill. It’s a album to put on when you’ve closed the laptop, drawn the shades, and are ready to close your eyes and look inward.
Therapy isn’t always meditative, however; sometimes catharsis is the answer. For that, turn to the sarcastically titled A Calm, Measured Response, from Two Weeks Notice, a duo made up of Tribe One and Mikal kHill, based in Georgia and North Carolina respectively, but both part of the large musical family that makes up the New Haven-based record label Fake Four, run by Ceschi Ramos. As kHill writes, Two Weeks Notice is a project five years in the making. The two musicians “were doing shows together constantly and started hyping each other’s sets and eventually decided we should just create a project that way.” The duo wrote its first album in two weeks — hence the name? — and went on tour together. Ramos, a fan of their work, asked if Two Weeks Notice would be willing to contribute music to his record label’s Freecember series of releases. The duo said yes; the two musicians were sitting on a lot of material. But when the time came to hand in the album, “we found ourselves scrapping everything we had in advance and ground out 6 new tracks on the spot for our first Christmas-Day release as a duo. I think the result is an EP to speaks to our isolation in the age of Covid-19, our lives as fathers and husbands and also as two emcees still at the top of their game, over some of my best production.”
The energy and spontaneity of the album’s creation shows through. The opener, “Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson,” burns with anthemic fury, while “Can’t Ever Hold Us Down” bops with hope. “Falls Apart” and “Drown” offer moments of contemplation, while “Falling Up” starts ramping up the energy again. In some sense it’s all a setup for the album’s final track, “Getting Better,” an openly honest and emotional cut with a chorus — “everything’s gonna be much better / things have got to get better / everything’s gonna be much better / ‘cause they can’t be worse” — that speaks about as directly to our time as a song can. Swinging from the deeply personal for the broadly social, “Getting Better” pulls strength from despair, and shows us how we can do the same.
