Posts Tagged ‘The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea’

The LOW ANTHEM – ” The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea “

Posted: February 26, 2018 in MUSIC
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Rhode Island-based folk band The Low Anthem have just released their newest LP, The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea, via Joyful Noise Recordings. Per the band’s announcement earlier this year, the concept album tells a story inspired by one found inside the Kay Larsen-written biography of John Cage, Where the Heart Beats: A salt doll goes into the depths of the sea to find herself but loses her body in the process. The beautiful story comes to a pivotal point during the third song on the LP, “Give My Body Back.” The Low Anthem now share the music video for this song .

The music video is hauntingly beautiful. Created by Dann Dodd and The Low Anthem co-founder Ben Knox Miller, it follows the narrative of a cube-shaped salt doll as she enters the waters of the ocean to discover who she really is. Knox Miller shares what brought about the salt doll’s unique shape:

In its lyrics, “Give My Body Back” describes the underwater landscape in which the salt doll now finds herself. Still unclear about who she is, the salt doll observes herself in relation to her new world and realizes she is dissolving: “Under the wilder cyclones / Tearing at my skin / I see the edges soften / As I shed some part back in.”

The themes of self-discovery found on The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea come at the end of a period of reflection and profound evolution for the band and its respective members, after having survived a car accident that ended their 2016 tour. The band now find purpose at a grass-roots level, giving back to their community by running a vaudeville-era theater in Providence, R.I., managed by band co-founders Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky. “I like to call it a palace of music,” says Prystowsky. “You’re walking into a theatre from almost a hundred years ago, still intact, built for the acoustics of music, pre-the invention of the PA. It’s so unlike anything in the 21st century that it ignites your creative muscles to work. You immediately lose your frame of reference, in a good way.”

The LOW ANTHEM – ” The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea “

Posted: February 8, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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I can’t think of another album that sounds quite like The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea. Not in title, not in sound. there are the familiar song structures and vocal harmonies.  We first heard this ensemble from nearby Providence Rhode Island  signed to Nonesuch Records with a brilliant album about environmental decay called Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. That record was followed by Smart Flesh, after which they huddled back home to build a recording studio inside an old vaudevillian theater, birthing both an iconic art space and the album Eyeland.

In late June 2016, while on the road to play a show in Washington D.C., founding member Ben Knox Miller remembers the moment when everything changed for The Low Anthem. After a horrific auto crash “I remember looking at the burning van wrapped around a steel pole and knowing it was the end of Eyeland,” he wrote in an email. “I wasn’t hurt so I rented a box truck and packed up all our broken instruments and drove them from D.C. to Providence. That night I was reading Kay Larsen’s biography of John Cage, Where the Heart Beats, and came across the Salt Doll fable. I have found several versions of the Salt Doll story, but all basically tell the story of a doll that wants to know the ocean. The ocean says ‘come in.’ It puts its toe in, and knows something, but loses its toe. Puts its foot in, knows more, but loses its foot… and so on. I began to imagine its journey, and 16 days later the first version of [our new] album was written and recorded. (I had to wait for Jeff [Prystowsky] to recover, and together we rendered the final version.)”

 

The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is a stark journey, made even starker by the odd percussion that haunted me during my initial listens. The spare percussion wasn’t drums, but it felt oddly familiar, like something I heard a lot as kid and as a teen. Ben Knox Miller solved the mystery for me.

“I don’t know what kind of headspace I was in for those 16 days,” he wrote. “I was alone. All of my regular instruments were destroyed (along with my bandmates). I had a parlor acoustic [guitar], a 64-key piano and a ’90s era DA-88 digital 8-track tape machine in my bedroom. I had been using it to record abstract instrumental tracks, produced by processing beats physically cut into the center loops of vinyl records. My turntable was running 24 hours a day and I set up a signal chain with crossovers and guitars pedals and electronic and physical filters, and the room was filled with continuous hypnotic sound.”

That was it: the sound of the inner grooves of a record going round and round and round as percussion. It’s quite brilliant given what feels to me like the circular nature of the tale told. Ben Knox Miller confirmed my suspicion.

“I think of the music as made of circles,” he wrote. “There is a safe sense of time (a constant feeling of return), but some of the space that is opened up is so bare as to be nearly uncomfortable. Amongst ourselves we call the sound ‘subtle energy circularism.’ A lot of the sounds on Salt Doll comes from tiny sources, like a chopstick scraping the rim of a brown paper bag or a record needle bouncing in a divot.”

Like I said. This is truly an album like no other.

The Low Anthem performs “In The Pepsi Moon” for The Crypt Sessions.

The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea comes out February. 23rd via Joyful Noise Recordings.

The LOW ANTHEM – ” The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea “

Posted: January 10, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The Low Anthem  have announced their newest LP, The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea, along with an album trailer for the work. The Rhode Island natives come back in 2018 inspired by a car accident that changed the band.

“One second you’re dozing off in the passenger seat on the way to a gig, and the next, there’s fire and hell flames and black smoke and your face is bleeding and you can’t see, and you can’t process information, and you think it’s all over.” These are the words of Jeff Prystowsky, a founding member of the band, who describes the car accident that resulted in the cancellation of The Low Anthem’s 2016 tour after just four days on the road.

On the way to a show in Washington, D.C, The Low Anthem’s tour van crashed, wrecking a lot of the band’s gear and instruments in the process, and putting Prystowsky out of commission for several weeks as he receoved from minor injuries. The accident was said to be a driving force behind the band’s new album, created while Prystowsky was in recovery.

The album, conceptualized by Low Anthem cofounder Knox Miller, was inspired by John Cage biography Where the Heart Beats, written by Kay Larsen. The book tells the story of a salt doll who goes to the sea in search of herself. Each time, the salt doll puts a piece of her inside the ocean—she gains the wisdom that the ocean brings, but dissolves herself little by little until every part of her is lost in the sea. The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is a concept album following the narrative of the salt doll in her quest for self-discovery.

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From the album’s sound, we can count on the usual harmonic voices of the band accompanied by guitars and “subtle yet immersive” electronic ambiance. Miller had to record the album using stripped-down instruments, since most of the band’s gear was lost in the accident. What we can expect from this album is a band that’s matured far beyond their conception in 2006. With their collective life experiences and the band members’ personal highs and lows,

The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is set to release February. 23rd