Toronto composer Christopher Mayo is releasing an album of three compositions today, featuring grab-you-by-the-ears performances by guitarist Andrew Noseworthy and harpist Grace Scheele. Walk the Darkness Down is transfixing.
To fully appreciate the album’s title piece, start with Townes Van Zandt’s 1969 track “Lungs,” which serves as a reference point. Mayo’s piece combines 10 open-string guitars, detuned to mimic Van Zandt’s minor imperfections.
“I have always had a love for plucked strings,” Mayo told me by email. “I think it’s just something about the natural decay envelope. The connection of the physicality of the pluck and that connection to duration.”
The album’s title piece was composed for the 21c Guitar Festival in Ottawa in 2019. Noseworthy was one of six guitarists who took part in its premier. “I had composed ‘Walk the Darkness Down’ through a process of recording, editing and collaging various sounds for these detuned guitars,” Mayo says. “But I’m not a guitarist, so Andrew really brought so much to the project.”
When performed live, five of the six performers play two detuned guitars each. “So, in creating a multi-tracked studio version, it was important to create a sound world that felt really unified, but where you could still really distinguish these different layers,” Mayo says. “I think Andrew really captured that.”
“A Sick, Sly Age,” composed for this album release, is even better. Scheele’s prepared harp runs roughshod over an extended glissando. Noseworthy drags us back and forth across his guitar with tortured patience, producing a kind of next-level drone.
“Grace and Andrew brought so much to this whole process,” Mayo says.
The album wraps with its most gentle effort, “It Could Be You Or You Or You” for solo harp. Again though, Scheele pushes her instrument beyond the confines of minimalism. For all its quiet beauty, there’s a lot going on.
Each of the three works are fully notated, Mayo says, “although what that means for each piece is slightly different.”
“It Could Be You Or You Or You” is a conventional composition, though the mixing process included a lot of processing.
“We had this idea that the whole album gradually gets a bit more distant, moving from the relatively clean and up-close ‘Walk the Darkness Down’ to this washed out over-reverbed ‘It Could Be You Or You Or You,’” Mayo says. “So we spent a bit of time really looking for that exact right sound that would make it feel very intentional and like just slightly too muchreverb.”
More new music
Aidan Baker + rsn – Bottom Layers of A Surface: Baker’s guitar can be overwhelming, no matter the setting. That’s not a knock — his library is packed with deeply emotional recordings and he’s a force of nature live. On this collab with electronic artist rsn, Baker turns the volume down to great effect. Love this, for its subtle complexity.
Dead Can Dance – Our Day Will Come: Missed this one last week. The Anglo-Irish collective has pulled its music from streaming platforms and set up shop on Bandcamp. This new single — featuring a vintage Brendan Perry vocal — is the first in a series planned on a monthly schedule this year. Half the proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Zosha Warpeha – I grow accustomed to the dark: Two long-form beauties by the Brooklyn-based composer-performer and Hardanger fiddler. The work combines her study of traditional Norwegian music with a tense, urbane modernism
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