Mist

In ancient times, when mist closed around a ship, the only way forward was to slow down and listen. Birds, breaking waves, fog bells, gongs, and horns became the new language of navigation, alongside depth soundings that sampled the seabed with a lead line and revealed it's hidden shape. Technology has largely rendered those methods obsolete, but there is still something compelling about trading sight for sound and touch. That shift is at the heart of AEAEA's - the new duo of Patrick Higgins & Nicolás Jaar - debut album, Mist, an album that asks: how do you find your bearings when the world around you goes into a blur?The duo's genesis goes back to the 2019 Le Guess Who? festival, for which Higgins served as artist curator. Named after the hazy mythical terrain of oak and beech woodlands, the island and it's encircling stories became a source of inspiration for both musicians, who have long favoured mixtures of ancient harmony and electronic experimentation.The album emerges from the pair's exploration of a new shared language, in which Higgins's guitar and percussion are routed live through Jaar's real-time effects chains, rendering sampling, dubbing and processing as musical instruments in their own right. Recorded over three years between Berlin and Higgins's studio in upstate New York, Mist folds the hazy, intuitive logic of processing chains and improvisation into the core of the composition. The record develops a series of melodic themes that emerge from Higgins's guitar and refract into a sea of electronics, percussion, and eventually a fuller ensemble of keyboards, organs, drums, and the cello improvisations of composer Judith Hamann. Mist's soundscapes are mournful, and slow, with notes often encircled in a blue-grey vapor. At times we perceive rays of distant light piercing through the blur but mostly, we hear echoes of distant shores whose rhythms might finally allow us to see without vision.