Tent Music

Playing at times like a more brutal, fractured version of Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet's 2018 song cycle, Landfall while careening from bone-rattling fuzzed-out violin drones that wouldn't be out of place on Stephen O'Malley's Cylene to glorious psychedelic pop songs, Tent Music centers intuition to the point of channeling spirits-cum-archetypes. Tobin's avant-operatic background, including work with Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon, and her celebrated work as White Boy Scream certainly serve as reference points for this work, but the circumstances surrounding Tent Music set it apart from that work, as from the rest of earthly existence. It is in no small sense ritual music in the footsteps of Coil, perhaps automatic music, in the spirit of Austin Osman Spare's automatic drawing. In June 2021, Hill, violinist - noted film composer and multimedia artist - was staying with his parents in Northern Arizona, simultaneously retreating from the pandemic and caring for his father, in the throes of dementia. Tobin, passing through on her way from Los Angeles to New Mexico, stopped to stay for a few nights, pitching a tent in the Hill's yard. On a whim, Hill and Tobin decided to set up microphones and a few instruments in the tent and record, only miles from then raging wildfires, a hundred feet from Hill's ailing father - and yet, evidently, a world apart from any of it: sealed off from the smoky skies and from Hill's father, swept up in a mind cutting itself loose from reason.