Jarboe – Sightings

Consouling Sounds

Loving the meditative space Sightings affords the listener, Jarboe’s drone-registered voice affixed to reverberating gong and paddling percussive on “Holy Waters” as strings and blown accompaniment warmly blur, folding into a respiring abstraction of leisurely repeat.

The medieval dance of “Francesca Sun” that has her voice peeking through the pulsation as airy serpents harmonically shimmer to piano repeats. All ending in a seraphed thread of spoken word — the type that never fails to send a shiver down your spine.

From here on in, Jarboe removes the need for words as her voice choruses in the curling claustro-candy of “Choir And Night Fox”. Moonlit and liminal, its heady fragrance climbing on a slow percussive and darkened chant. A dirgy flavour tied to a Sophia-like drizzle of sustained chord punctured in cawing cries of a night fox. Its canvas expanding in soft organ accents and pointed keys, to finally cut back to the puckered purity of struck string and animal call.

Slingshotting into the stripped-back aesthetic of “Breath”, Jarboe’s voice becoming a shivering apparition within glinting hand cymbals and chorused trumpet, her exhale sometimes seismically shifted by lovely reed-parting electronics. I’m impressed by the richness of the atmospherics here, the subtle potency of their narrative and the way Jarboe’s sense of self seems to dissolve into the whole.

A lightness of touch rounded nicely off by “Vireo Serenade”, a track where field recordings of the song bird (heard from outside her window) and Jarboe twin to a peppering of sparse piano. A delicate Erik Satie-esque bleed that’s a welcome antithesis to the overt loudness of the world from a tiny bird often seen as a symbol of hope, a harbourer of fresh starts.

A track that feels like a natural conclusion earmarked by an instrumental revisit to the album’s opener that roughens up the original in trotting tabla, swaying strings and plumbing percussives to retract on a Rachel’s-like soft centre that symphonically pours, siphoned into what sounds like a garden soirée. A curious retreading followed closely by a surprise (and welcome) revisit to her solo debut Thirteen Masks as “Of Ancient Memory (Oblivion Mix)” gives us back the songwriter’s mystery to sirened loops, her words a sulphurous wound full of dark prophecy.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-