I love what Jason Calhoun has to say about this first song from his upcoming album revelations of divine love:
I enjoy working with abstracted, gestural melody that isn’t necessarily connected to a traditional beat. The tapping ‘bass drum’ rhythm in ‘tolstoy tatsoi’ offers a subverted sense of rhythm which feels disjointed yet in place with the rest of the track — similar to tapping your foot to a song in your head while the radio plays something else.
As my daughter has gotten old enough to (vehemently) make song requests when we’re in the car together, I more than ever find myself thinking about one piece of music while another one is playing. Though I have managed to turn her on to some good music (her favorite song is probably Pixies – ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’), she generally wants to hear K-Pop Demon Hunters or something from a Disney movie. Consequently, I am frequently imagining music I’ve recently written or heard against a backdrop of Indina Menzel and Kristen Bell, or the like. Weirdly enough, this isn’t as bad as it may seem: I get to imagine my own music in a totally different light and do so with my daughter as she experiences joy. Apart from my own experience, Calhoun also manages to make something really special of the relationships this kind of approach can yield. It’s almost as if listening to this requires you use your ears separately from one another, and then the two satisfyingly and momentarily intersect. And maybe my own experience isn’t far from Calhoun’s mark anyway; the album is about how prosaic experiences converge with the profound, how revelations of divine love are experienced as we walk through life, not just at its apices.
The Philly-based artist also shared another song from the new album, ‘at home’ — this one doesn’t make use of the same rhythmic device, employing a somewhat more conventional approach to the relationship between the song’s minimal rhythm elements and its sweet, resigned, almost yielding melody. The result is nonetheless deeply comforting, which I suppose is what being at home should feel like. (Plus, there’s a very gratifying intermittent bird squawk sound that had me looking around the first time I listened to the song as I walked home from work.)
These are available now on bandcamp as part of the preorder–the album releases August 7th.
Jason Calhoun – “tolstoy tatsoi”
Jason Calhoun – “at home”