AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities

There’s some­thing to be said for sounds and the peo­ple who love them. All musi­cal artists worth a salt love music, they love songs, of course, duh. But I have a par­tic­u­lar fas­ci­na­tion for singers, song­writ­ers, bands, orches­tral three pieces, xylo­phone col­lec­tives, what have you, that are clearly fas­ci­nated with sound itself, as a medium. And when some­one loves sound and songs? Oh boy. A song­writer who loves sounds is a poten­tially pow­er­ful musi­cal force—a per­son who’s love for the com­mu­ni­ca­tion extends to the mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The great­est artists are always like this: the best painters have a love for the color and tex­ture beyond the paint­ings; the best writ­ers, a love for words beyond the story.

Jas­mine Wag­ner of Brooklyn/Montana’s Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties is exactly this kind of musi­cian. Quite frankly, she’s this kind of writer and artist, too. Wag­ner, together with fel­low sound-conspirator Alex Wil­son are the items belong­ing to this curi­ous nat­ural cab­i­net. Together their folky ten­den­cies and love of sound cre­ate a most serene con­coc­tion: 1 part sound­scape, 2 parts folk song, all parts lovely.

You might be quick to call Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties “exper­i­men­tal folk,” and you wouldn’t be the first one. The mod­i­fier “exper­i­men­tal” has quickly become a sig­ni­fier of the “sound lover” state I described above, and in that way it is telling. How­ever, in an imag­i­nary world where gen­res weren’t pre­dom­i­nantly used as some kind of socio-musical cat­e­go­riza­tion, and merely used as descrip­tion, Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties might just as much be con­sid­ered exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ica. For even though the fore­ground sounds are often the acoustic gui­tar and voice (the folk) I would argue that it’s what is in the back­ground that actu­ally makes Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties, well, a curiosity.

Many of the songs on the full length Search­light Nee­dles (from which our two Ampeater tracks orig­i­nate) are very fre­quently cen­tered inside some kind of noise or atmos­phere. When this is at its peak, on tracks such as “Lit­tle Ice Age,” “Sun,” or “Glass,” it feels like the songs are sim­ply sung inside some great weather event or cave—the tracks become oddly geo­graph­i­cal for me. I’ve been read­ing “The Ice Palace,” by Tar­jei Vesaas recently, and I can’t help but pic­ture “Lit­tle Ice Age” (avail­able on their myspace) as tak­ing place inside a frozen waterfall.

The point being, the elec­tron­ics and noise used by Cab­i­net (Can I call them Cab­i­net for short? I can’t help but feel like when pitch­fork gives their next LP (ten­ta­tively titled “But­ter­milk Chan­nel”) an 8.5 and all the Green­wich Vil­lage hip­sters start lis­ten­ing to them, this is what I’ll over­hear the kids stand­ing out­side Tisch smok­ing cig­a­rettes refer to them as…) are simul­ta­ne­ously apart from, and inte­gral to, the songs. This is a won­der­ful effect and sounds more like Leonard Cohen play­ing next to Faust inside a sub­way sta­tion than any­thing else. It’s quite splendid.

Turn­ing to the dig­i­tal sin­gle we have on dis­play here, the story is per­haps even more curi­ous. More so than any of the other tracks on Search­light Nee­dles, I think, Side-A “For Sparrow”/Side-B “Owl­lul­laby” are songs, not sounds. Flip to any track on the LP and you’ll know that Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties loves sounds; but it’s not per­haps until you hear these two songs back to back that you real­ize just how much love Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties has for The Song as well.

Take A-side “For Spar­row” for instance. The song cen­ters around Wagner’s voice and strums, filled out by lush sine-wave drips and an inse­curely steady organ hum that com­plete the atmos­phere of the track. But it’s Wagner’s multi-layered vocals here that lift the song, push­ing and pulling it along, find­ing slow beau­ti­ful hooks within this sound­scape. Heck, drop the drips and the organ, and this is sim­ply a folk song with a lit­tle bit of bass.

The last two min­utes of “For Spar­row” give the game up, though, as the song fades away into an ambi­ent sonic col­lage that main­tains and extends the mood of the song like some strange held note. This “dis­cur­sion” is noth­ing new in music, but what is slightly novel is the length of the track devoted to the sounds. What many bands might limit to 15 or 30 sec­onds as a “cool outro, bro,” Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosi­ties let extend into a musi­cal motion with more lev­ity, own­ing almost a full quar­ter of the track’s run­ning time. I love how the two sec­tions of this track play off each other—at first lis­ten, the end­ing is a bit of a sur­prise. How­ever, it arises so organ­i­cally that now I can’t pic­ture the track with­out it. This, truly, is a song from lovers of sound, and they inte­grate the two ele­ments in a way that would make it unruly to sep­a­rate them.

B-side “Owl­lul­laby” is, if I’m con­tin­u­ing with this sound/song con­trast (thanks for bear­ing with me, by the way), is all song, baby. “Owl­lul­laby” also not-so-coincidentally func­tions as the final track on Search­light Nee­dles. In the movie in my head of this album, this is when the musi­cians, who have until this point been bat­tling through storms and ice caves and noise mon­sters, finally emerge into an open field to sim­ply play, only voice, gui­tar, and some cheer­ful bells to accom­pany. The song is hyp­notic, seduc­tive, and really is a lul­laby that I will con­sider singing to my kids, even though they will not be owls. The acoustic gui­tar sounds off in never-faltering 1–2-3–1-2–3 while the tiny high bells chirp in to accen­tu­ate the dream.

The tran­si­tion from “For Spar­row” to “Owl­lul­laby” actu­ally mim­ics quite well the effect that the album has on how we per­ceive “Owl­lul­laby” with the swirling last quar­ter of “For Sparrow“‘s sonic glory resolv­ing itself into the pleas­ant and sat­is­fy­ing pluck­ing. Some of the branches lost their leaves / to show off the owls in the trees. / Some of those owls would agree / you should close your eyes and fall asleep. Yes, yes you should. This is music I want to fall asleep and dream to, and any good lover of ambi­ent music (or music with some ambiance) knows that is far from an insult.

Wag­ner remarks that these two tracks fit together as an A-side/B-side because, “one is a win­ter song and one is a sum­mer song. They oppose each other the way the sea­sons do. Both songs were writ­ten and recorded dur­ing a cold Mon­tana win­ter, though ‘For Spar­row’ ref­er­ences a hot a smoky sum­mer when the pine forests were burn­ing and the skies of the Mis­soula val­ley were yel­low and gray, the moon red at night.” I have three things to add/note on this.

First, I think this is good evi­dence that beau­ti­ful sen­tences sim­ply tum­ble out of Wag­ner, poten­tially with­out her even mean­ing it. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a bet­ter sen­tence given to me in the body of an email.

Sec­ond, this dichotomy mim­ics the dichotomy of sounds I’ve been dis­cussing that’s present in Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curiosity’s music, the hot of the human voice and gui­tar and cold, ster­ile elec­tron­ics, or reversed, the hot highs of elec­tronic war­blings and the low steady hum of voice and string. Whichever way Cab­i­net of Nat­ural Curios­ity decides to play it, this con­trast is always present in the songs. To me, that’s what’s in the cab­i­net. Some­thing sum­mer, and some­thing winter.

Third, I shall add only that both of these songs are about birds. And when one trav­els to Wagner’s art site, one finds another bird to greet them. It makes a great deal of sense. Both of these songs are birds. Stun­ning, strik­ing birds.

Rick Andrews

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