Once tinkling like a wind chime at the behest a soft breeze, then pondering each key like an apprentice learning the keys of a weathered church organ or a sleepy child playing on the floor with a toy piano.
Fletcher McDermott made ten “small recordings” of a celesta, sketches he calls them, on his telephone, surrounded by cables, buzzing amplifiers and boiler rumble, in his Long Island home. The celesta is a metallophone invented in the late nineteenth century, played like a piano, its felt hammers striking hanging bars, which resonate inside a wooden chamber. He evolved each piece by adding guitar and piano, but only as the merest shadings and highlights. What he seems to have shaped the most is the very air around it.
McDermott’s Variations for the Celesta is a kind of gentle steampunk. Once tinkling like a wind chime at the behest a soft breeze, then pondering each key like an apprentice learning the keys of a weathered church organ or a sleepy child playing on the floor with a toy piano. Its reach extends from grabbing at atoms and making sense of them on “Prelude in E Major,” across an unearthly, clammy drone ending in Morse code, to the alien but benevolent Enovian soundscape “The Weight of the Frost on the Branch.” Voices barely audibly murmur in the background, like foreign conversation bleeding into McDermott´s cell phone.
The rare delight of Variations for the Celesta is being brought so intimately inside the music, inside the recording and inside the odd, old instrument. It is warm and it is cold, it is tactile in all its creaking physicality and inferential as chance and accident gently fray the listener´s neurological processes. With this release, a new non-profit, experimental art edition label is launched (though it is clearly numberd “02”).
Eilean Rec. sees itself as an island on a map, and each of the one hundred projected releases adds square mileage as it charts itself. Slipped into each CD sleeve is a fragment of that map. Variations for the Celesta is an auspicious debut, unique and strangely moving.
Variations for the Celesta is available on Eilean Rec..
