Constellation
Caoilfhionn Rose; "Josephine"; from Gondwana Records
While Caoilfhionn Rose has never spoken explicitly about the album art for her record Constellation, it’s easy to take the visualization literally—it is a constellation unto itself, a naive and playful story to be told from a collection of disparate images. However, it’s hard for one to not think of it as a score for some kind of piece. It’s painterly, showing abstract ideas of form, soundscape, texture, dynamics.
For some, musical notation is oblique enough to be dispiriting. A lucky few of us are trained to decipher these weird blobs and glyphs and make something out of them. An even luckier few were able to write, not just read, and whole worlds opened up. We eventually played through the pain and got to the point we could turn the paper and map it into sounds made with lips, teeth, fingers, breath—into something that envelops and overcomes us. I was not one of those people, so when I discovered that graphic scores were A Thing, I was many things—inspired (by the manifold curiosity of representation); concerned (by the imprecision of taking an abstract idea and making it even more abstract by using a wholly unique way of representing it); and disturbed (how idiotic these things frequently looked on the page). In the same way that book cover designers get hooked on a trend and they all look the same for a season, I feel that some records are in the same field of stars, ready to be mapped together through a similar visual identity.
I found Constellation through the same means that I discovered other artists I love in the contemporary scene; of things which are not quite jazz, not quite singer-songwriter, not quite post-rock: the algorithmic playlist, the tastemaker website, the quality selection from a trusted industry impresario. Knowing for certain which brought Caoilfhionn to me is a near-impossibility, an exercise best left to the surveillance capitalists of 2021. But what I do know: the music on this album is pluralistic, combining vaguely psychedelic folk with threads from the ambient, jazz, and electronic worlds, conjuring a dark atmospheric landscape that could be brought forth in any musical era. She is picking up where John Martyn left off, but with updated production—the nonlinear editor instead of the tape machine. Constellations, too, are nonlinear until you connect the dots.
Verdict: Keep
What stars are in your constellation?