Slow Machete – Evening Dust Choir (self-released)
It's hard not to let the circumstances regarding the creation of Evening Dust Choir, the debut release from Slow Machete, affect a judgment of the work. That the album was constructed from samples culled from field recordings made by Joe Schaffer during his multiple trips to Haiti with a variety of medical aid groups following the earthquake that devastated that country in 2010 could easily give some listeners the idea that the album is possessed of some Bono-style sanctimony, some studious yet joyless ethnomusical inclinations, or worse yet, some Moby-esque appropriation of Haitian music as an aesthetic adornment. This isn't to say that some of these suspicions aren't necessarily warranted (the listening public has been subjected to decades worth of each of the aforementioned approaches), though they do betray the readiness with which cynicism can inform any snap opinion, but what Schaffer has created works around those preconceptions, toying with expectations of electronic music and so-called “world” music and, in doing so, asserting a common creative thread that knows no national bounds.
Given the tumultuous circumstances that birthed the album, its songs possess a stately, ethereal grace, only occasionally incorporating spurts of clattering, discordant percussion. The modified samples are ubiquitous, with the vocal elements generally raised to a higher pitch and rhythmic components largely consisting of lower-pitched recordings of native percussion and, as the project's title suggests, machetes. The effect is disorienting, a fracturing and reconfiguring of reality into a mosaic of different tonal shards, one in which the harshness of the realities that birthed the album are ever-present but rarely placed at the music's forefront or subjected to any sort of didactic moralizing.
Though indirect, there seems to be some overarching concept to the lyrics that Shaffer overlays on the songs. There are constant references to familial trauma and to death in its manifold variants. But none of it takes on too direct a storyline, often falling closer to the Faulknerian iceberg model of narrative writing, one in which, like a chunk of glacier adrift in open sea, only the top ten percent is visible, leaving the remainder submerged and implicit. Sometimes the lyrics are sparse, such as “Wolf Chase,” which consists of a single verse (“Wait up at night in the tree / And hide out 'til your father leaves / As wolves wait at night in the weeds / And hide out 'til the farmer sleeps”) that's no less evocative for its minimalism. Some, like “Swollen Hands” and the album's title track, are more expansive in their narrative, each laden with images of ominous insect swarms, of adolescent rebellion, of corpses, and of retrospection. Though these songs are more lyrically dense, the content is no less oblique than in the briefer songs, with no clearly-defined narrative arc in place. This general lack of concrete detail helps the lyrical content situate itself within the context of a cross-cultural project such as this. Though there are a handful of exceptions – song titles like “Santiago” and “Fallen Mangoes” certainly lend some geographical specificity - it's easy to see the imagery in these songs as a sort of existential common denominator, overlaid onto any life regardless of its time or place.
Ultimately, Evening Dust Choir works as much because of what it doesn't do as what it does. The album doesn't come across like an attempt to document some Western idea of an authentic Haitian culture (though listeners who might prefer to hear the contributing Haitian musicians in a less electronically-modified context would do well to check out Son De Soley, a compilation of Haitian vocal music that Shaffer curated). Though Haiti's poverty and suffering factor into this album's inception, they aren't its primary focus. And the Haitian musicians that contributed to the album aren't there to provide some sort of window dressing with which the American musician proves his worldliness. Their efforts underpin and fortify the project as a whole and, while one individual may have assembled the samples, the varied contributions make it seem more collaborative than many such efforts. These reflections upon universal experiences ultimately pull the album together into a coherent whole, a sustained meditation upon the beauty and commonality of the creative spirit and its role in a world that often seems to offer little more than destruction and degradation.
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Slow Machete's debut can be streamed and downloaded free at slowmachete.bandcamp.com.
The Son De Soley compilation is available at sondesoley.bandcamp.com, with all profits going to continued medical relief efforts in Haiti.