Newsom, Joanna
Divers
2015 release from the harpist, keyboardist, singer and songwriter. Divers is Newsom's first album since 2010. Good
heavens - five years go by - what can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with diversions
aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads, narrated from parts unknown; a family of
polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns
and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and
Marxophones and Moogs, clavichords and celestas and of course the harp, thrumming its threnodies of circadian invasions
and avian irruptions and strange loops of Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned
Simulacreage. The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed
and passing times...a round, a chant, an incantation...a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that
striate, in chromatic collusion, their simultaneous arc...a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced
for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among
the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course through the
public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch
Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills, and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity a tragedy of
parochial time, anecdotal time, dubious time.
Price
Genre
Format
CD - 1 disk
Release
23-10-2015
Label
Item-nr
886054
EAN
0781484056126
Availability
Not in stock
Tracks
Title
Artist
1
ANECDOTES
2
SAPOKANIKAN
3
LEAVING THE CITY
4
GOOSE EGGS
5
WALTZ OF THE 101ST LIGHTBORNE
6
THE THINGS I SAY
7
DIVERS
8
SAME OLD MAN
9
YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY HEART ALIVE
10
A PIN-LIGHT BENT
11
TIME, AS A SYMPTOM