Photo: Peter Coccoma

Back in July, American experimental electronic composer Elori Saxl released her mini-album Drifts and Surfaces, and she is ready to follow it up with a new album. Entitled Earth Focus, the album is a collection of new material composed to soundtrack the PBS TV documentary series of the same name. Focusing on environmental challenges, each episode on the series looks at a specific location like the Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave Desert, amongst other places in Southern California. Her music “underscores the emotional narratives of these places, emphasizing the interplay between humans and nature and the impact of human-constructed environments”, as the press release describes.

Earth Focus arrives on November 15th through Western Vinyl, and ahead of it Saxl has shared the first single ‘Grows Along The River Slow’. Of the track, she says:

“It was inspired by the languid flow of the LA river and the plants that grow within and alongside it, pushing through cracks in cement and finding ways to flourish despite the human-built landscape. The track features analog synths with synthetic harp and flute samples that eventually give in to real acoustic flute performed by Stuart Bogie. I would say this track is me leaning into the psychedelic and floaty sounds of Californian music a bit beyond my comfort zone as a New Yorker, but it felt right for the series to lean deep and create music evocative of the musical scene past and present in Southern California.”

A serene and engrossing piece, ‘Grows Along The River Slow’ is after your ears.

Photo: Max Basch

Elori Saxl has announced a mini-album titled Drifts and Surfaces, releasing on July 19th through Western Vinyl. The follow-up to her acclaimed 2021 debut, The Blue of Distance, features three-pieces which emerged from various commissions, including commissions from Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion (‘Drifts I’) and Brooklyn’s Tigue (‘Drifts II’), and delves into themes of transient beauty and mundane existence, reflecting Saxl’s experiences on Madeline Island in Lake Superior. She comments:

 “I was trying to capture the sense of disappearing horizon, lostness, awe, and dark power that feels really innate to Lake Superior. It is also constantly changing – drifts change directions, water becomes ice, ice breaks apart and becomes waves. There is constant movement from drifts to surfaces, surfaces to drifts.”

A profound exploration of the ephemeral and the everyday, the upcoming Drifts and Surfaces blends live percussion and collaborative instrumentation, processed through digital manipulation to mirror the fragmented experience of modern life.

The American experimental electronic composer has shared the third and final piece, ‘Surfaces’, a gorgeous track imbued with an ethereal and meditative ambiance. This piece was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum linked to an Alex Katz retrospective, and captures the subtle shifts in perception and the sense of collective identity among artists. “The ways in which our perception of things change not because they change but because we change,” explains Saxl. “I wanted to have these really minor changes feel dramatic, to mirror the imagined movement in his paintings.” She continues:

“Katz’s depiction of multiple generations of New York City artists inspired me to think about how there is no individual ‘me’ as an artist without both the artists who came before me and the community of artists I’ve grown alongside. The delineation between us blurs, and I feel as though I am carried on an interwoven surface formed by the community around me.”

Saxl has made a video to accompany ‘Surfaces’ and you can watch it below.

With the heavenly and contemplative The Blue of Distance just out in the tail end of January, Elori Saxl has now shared a beautiful new single from the album entitled ‘Before Blue’. The single comes paired with a stunning video directed by Emma Portner and features improvised choreography from Justin Dejager. Take a look.

The Blue of Distance is out now through Western Vinyl.

Photo: Alex Munro

2021 will kick off with a marvellous, serene and immersive new album from NYC-based musician and composer Elori Saxl. Entitled The Blue of Distance, the album borrows its title from Rebecca Solnit´s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost and saw Saxl explore the role technology plays in our relationships to geography and nature by blending processed recordings of wind and water with analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra. Half of the album was written in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York during the summer and the other half came to life on a frozen island in Lake Superior in the middle of winter.

Saxl shared some insight about the album:

“Being born in 1990, I was interested specifically in exploring what it means to have grown up contemporaneously with the proliferation of the internet and new technology such as Google Maps, Youtube, and smartphones filled with photos and videos that allow us to access distant people and places without being physically present. I was interested in understanding how the personal experience of memory formation may parallel humanity’s changing relationship with land through new technology that allows us access to a place or person without being physically present.

When I began working on the album, I was really focused on that abstract conceptual idea. I wrote the first half in the middle of summer in a beautiful verdant place, and it was one of the happiest times that I’ve experienced in my life. I returned to the album later that winter while living on an island in the middle of a very frozen Lake Superior. Emotionally, I was in a pretty low place, but I wanted the piece to feel cohesive, so I started looking back at photos and videos from my summer to try to remember what I’d felt like so that I could infuse the new music with that same emotion. Unsurprisingly, that process didn’t work, but what resulted was perhaps more interesting: a distorted version of the original experience and emotion. I’d begun the album using flowing water and wind as the sample source. For the 2nd half, I went to go collect more samples from my new surroundings, but the water was under a foot of ice. So the sound itself also became distorted through the ice, mimicking the process my memory was playing on the original experience. Through this process, what began as something conceptual became very personal.

Before starting the album, I’d been listening to a lot of electronic dance music and was struck by the use of modular synths to create pulsing beats. I’d been spending a lot of time sitting outside listening to the wind and water, which I noticed were also pulsing. It hit me that maybe there was a way to use those sounds as a sound source to create beats. So basically trying to figure out how to shape wind and water into a pulsing beat that emulated a modular synth (or rather, pull out the pulses inherent in those sounds) was what led to the musical foundation of The Blue of Distance. Then I just tried to think about what acoustic instruments the electronics sounded like and just write parts that mimicked the electronics so that there was a blurring and confusion of sounds. The water and wind samples’ pitch bends and sways, mimicking a synthesizer and confusing the distinction between natural and artificial (or digital) sounds.”

The Blue of Distance is set for release on January 22nd through Western Vinyl and ahead of it, Saxl has already enticed us with two cuts from the album, ‘Wave I’ and ‘Wave III’. Both come with a self-directed video accompaniment. Take a look.