Nostalgia-core is at it’s highest with “Salmon Loops” by power group VALES, including Asa (project master-mind), Ben Seretan, Eliza McKelway, Bryan West, and Trevor Wilson. And it’s not so much a familiar sound they’re replicating, but an original one that helps your memory stir and bring you back to the years before. That calm serene vocal echo. Chorals in tune with a fades synth being scaled out in the background. Atmospheric structures like buildings encapsulating imagination from the past. Like an old hum your grandmother used to emit while ironing on Sundays. Or distant singing of a familiar melody that you can’t put your finger on, but it’s the window of time that it brings you to that’s most important. Listen. Witness:
More on VALES from Asa:
In the winter of 2012 my best friend and longtime musical partner Dominic died of a completely unexpected stroke at the age of 23. A year later I found myself in rural Northern California, where we grew up, living in a studio on the wild edge of Mendocino county, deep in grief. Dominic had been a salmon biologist, and every day I walked along the nearby wild river, following traces of boar, deer, and mountain lions, while hawks whirled overhead. One day I was sitting on a boulder overlooking a pool in a small tributary of the river, and I looked down, and to my great surprise there was a full grown salmon, impossibly far upstream and out of season. It felt like a visitation, and was the first ray of hope in a very dark time.
A few months later an old employer of Dominic’s called to tell me that there were 50 salmon trapped by the drought in a deep pool on the Navarro river, an hour or so north. My job at the time was directing a performance in San Francisco with a Polish director that included a lot of my closest friends, and one day at the end of May we all made the drive together, up 101, and off West, past Philo…
We pulled off the dusty road and walked down to the pool under the bridge. At first it just looked like any other pool. I put on my snorkel and swim trunks and took out my iPhone with underwater case, and I dove in. At first, nothing… green algae… and then, suddenly, everywhere around me, incredibly huge fish, every hair on my body stood straight up, these huge prehistoric intelligences whirling around me, shocking me awake, leaving me breathless in the freezing water… open eyes and white tipped fins. Nothing prepared me for this.
So, here is some of the footage I shot that day, and a song, called Salmon Loops. There’s a lyric: “In the drought, who was stuck in the pool?/Was that you? Was that you?” … at first that was how it felt that day, coming face to face with these fierce creatures that Dominic had studied and protected – nearly visited by him, by his fierceness and warmth… but at the same time, I felt redeemed by their total otherness, the knowledge that they exist, this 20 million year old species who swim to sea and return home, utterly independent of us humans. They pulled me out of myself and my grief and back into the world.
This video is part of a larger project, called VALES, which is a unique website where songs and films interact that’s being released on Shatter Your Leaves records and Hope for the Tape Deck (as a cassette) on March 14th. It’s about loss, and grief, but also about redemption, and hope, and the things that make us human.
* * * * Oh! – a few more details: I moved back to New York in late 2013 and asked some of my best friends – Ben Seretan, Eliza McKelway, Bryan West, and Trevor Wilson – to start a new band with me to record these songs, which we did in an abandoned armory in upstate New York with JJ Beck in the depths of the coldest winter in memory. Neil Strauch (Bonnie Prince Billy, Andrew Bird) and I mixed the record in my apartment in Brooklyn last spring and summer. My friends Jes Sledge and Richard Hunter–Rivera made the films as part of the Koans and Performance Project, the performance I directed in San Francisco in 2013, and edited them this winter to fit the music. The website was designed by Joey Lappin.
• VALES: http://www.valesvalesvales.com
• Shatter Your Leaves Records: http://shatteryourleaves.com
• Hope for the Tape Deck: http://www.hopeforthetapedeck.com
More about: VALES
