Swallowed whole, Archive is comfort in resignation, commiseration in loss, a low-key celebration of ephemerality.
I wonder if folklorists or musicologists, or perhaps it takes a psychologist, have cottoned on to the fact that the sound of decay fascinates us because we have become completely inundated with so much shiny, ultraefficient, dust-free technology. While we expect, in fact demand, perfect, rapid performance from our new stuff, decay happens slowly and randomly to our old stuff, according to the inner logic of the erosion of structure, whether physical or emotional.
Danny Clay’s music is about things falling apart, or people falling from, as hitherto heard on small, grainy singles and EPs. Archive is his first full-length, a series of miniatures bookended by eleven and thirteen minute elegies, respectively. Its title begs the question as to whether these are pieces composed and recorded 2012-2014, and thus comprise an record of recent production, or if they were always intended to be played together, in this setting, in this order. It certainly runs seamlessly. Swallowed whole, Archive is comfort in resignation, commiseration in loss, a low-key celebration of ephemerality.
“Archive” is certainly an appropriate monicker for music which is so conscious of the presence of the past in the now, both in Clay’s use of obsolete material—music boxes, cassette tapes—and his use of musical tradition—his I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger (2011, Heat Death) was based on an eighteenth-century Appalachian spiritual. Archive has an air of the bygone, too, of the light that once penetrated the canopy, of a lost America. Danny Clay remembers and uplifts. He evinces a non-lachrymose nostalgia for these passings and fallings from. He frees the ghost from the machine, if only to fly among denuded treetops.
Archive is available on Eilean Rec..
