The opening couple of tracks from Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon’s new collaborative album Seeing Is Forgetting set the template for their work as a duo. On the first – titled ‘Reverence’ for the sense of wonder it is imbued with and evokes more than for any kind of genuflection – Saxl’s analogue synthesizer skirts or limns like a spectre the hearty reeds of Solomon, who plays the baritone saxophone or the almost equally unwieldy bass clarinet, instruments which are capable of plumbing similar depths. Then they switch for the patter of ‘Raindrops’ where Solomon’s wafting horn frames a lavish yet alien synthscape which pulses at least for a moment in resplendent widescreen.
As a composer Elori Saxl tends to combine analogue synthesizers with woodwinds in a manner that evokes the practice of a small chamber ensemble, with her music exploring nature and memory, often gesturing towards the fractures and erosions of both as her work is suffused with contemporary technological concerns and engages with popular forms while holding them warily at arm’s length. Seeing Is Forgetting extends her partnership with Solomon, who featured on her soundtrack for the virtual reality documentary Texada – a short about life on the island in British Columbia, a fading limestone quarry which has gained a modicum of popularity as a quiet outdoors retreat – and on the shapely ‘Surfaces’ where he and Saxl were joined by Robby Bowen on the glass marimba.
On this album Saxl relies on the Juno-106 analogue synthesizer while Solomon sometimes strays into eighties smooth jazz or saxophone solo mode, winsome and richly evocative on ‘Reverence’ and again on ‘A Thousand Steps’. His sound is characterised by an impossibly wide vibrato, offering a burnished vision of the late night. But despite a certain velvety lavishness there is plenty of room on Seeing Is Forgetting for the quiet or probing, as on ‘Symmetries’ with its hall of mirrors, askance looks and slow burn. Indeed the woozy lurch of ‘Symmetries’ is probably the closest musical correlate to the album cover, a somewhat jarring brown-grey blur of two apparently codependent individuals, who are staying upright as if by magic, adroitly balanced though both appear on the cusp of toppling over.
‘Reno Silver’ immediately suggests the casino and the shimmering kerplunk of the slot machine, though the name probably refers more explicitly to the minor league baseball team which existed on and off between 1947 and 1992. Opening with an anticipatory quiver, when the lever drops Saxl and Solomon produce such a lush, fuzzy and fathoms-deep sound that it both extols and negates the material world. Slinky synth pads shimmer against Solomon’s enveloping drone before the reedman elegantly overblows his instrument on what is one of the record’s standout tracks.
Saxl and Solomon share the compositional and production credits here as they give their collaborative practice new breadth or dimension and a narrative bent. The aforementioned ‘A Thousand Steps’ suggests smooth jazz with its soul and rhythm and blues inflections while rhythmically calling to mind disco or eighties house. Then the short ‘Hiding Place’ barrels through the night with unexpected menace, like one of the more harrowing scenes from Twin Peaks, laden with an air of desperation and summoning up barren streets or damp stairwells while carrying a furtive staticky charge. And the shared ‘Dream’ amounts to its near opposite, quivering and equally brief, on a piece which seems to ferry about its own trapdoor, as much to blot out a memory as to indulge in idle fantasy or crystallise one’s ardent hopes for the future.
‘Heart’ opens with the urbanity of the bal-musette but swiftly begins to shiver with the gassy and glacial atmosphere of outer space. Yet the closer and title piece ‘Seeing Is Forgetting’ returns to that lovely emergent warmth, which is to say a sense of prickly and enveloping warmth which still carries the chill of the outdoors and threshold as the lapping, pulsating stops of Solomon’s saxophone tally with Saxl’s quavering and oscillating synth drones. This steady and restrained yet propulsive sense of rhythm on ‘Seeing Is Forgetting’ compels the listener and no doubt the musicians themselves, building to a crescendo of sorts at around the halfway point before ceding to a diffuse patchwork of foghorn spurts and sustained tones plus the odd sweetly melodic passage.
