Life bubbles up beneath death.
The emergence of spring might have a sound for you. The rustling of robins, hushed winds blowing over freshly sprouting clover fields, but as winter’s grip loosens, something more elemental burbles. Composer Elori Saxl heard it from the shores of Lake Superior, the growing sounds of water flowing beneath thick sheets of ice. Under a surface of sheer stillness, life flowed.
Saxl took those sounds and made it the bedrock, both narratively and sonically, of her newest album The Blue of Distance. The manipulated sounds of water are the rhythmic spine of “Blue” and her arrangement of plucked strings in “Memory of Blue” eventually evaporates into the surrounding wall of flowing water, the two becoming inseparable.
The Blue of Distance wrangles with the ideas of memory and how they’re warped by the digital age, but it also stands alone as an album without any outside narrative. Alongside the seminal works of Gas and William Basinski, Saxl’s nexus of digital, analogue, nature and manipulation is one of the finest ambient albums in recent memory, calming in one deft arrangement, thought-provoking the next. We sat down with Saxl and chatted about her work.

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