On Separation by Heather Stebbins

The link between sound and memory is vivid in Heather Stebbins’ mind. On the Washington, DC-based composer and sound artist’s new album On Separation, echoes of past selves reverberate into the present, years dissolving into a gauzy translucence that hovers between the music’s genesis point and the listener’s ears. What began as a reintegration of dormant musical practices slowly shifted into a meditation on the nature of nostalgia itself, a prodding at how the brain relates to the pain and pleasure of the past. What we hear is the insight that emerges from that process: a bow drawn over cello strings in waves of tension and release before morphing into the chittering buzz of synthesizer and dissolving into air. What was once rooted and immutable becomes unpredictably transcendent as time does its thing.

Stebbins spent her formative years studying classical cello repertoire before becoming an electroacoustic composer, grounding her work in formal practices and honing it through academic rigor. As valuable as that learning process was, after years of communicating through the medium of scores and charts she began to crave the terrifying and euphoric feeling of performing one’s own material. Several years had been spent mentoring college students as a professor of computer music at George Washington University and it became clear that she should follow the advice she gives her students: walk your own path with patience and curiosity. The simple act of placing her fingers on her cello’s fingerboard began to feel significant, a necessary unlearning after years of separation from her own intuition and an instrument with a complicated, but meaningful, place in her life.

She began to soften as the first sounds that would become On Separation were recorded. Stebbins began with domestic field recordings: the sounds of her children, wind chimes ringing nonchalantly, the movement of people through undefined space. Rooted in her present, these recordings are charged with the implication that they soon will be something that’s looked back on. Stebbins folds in laminations of texture with her cello, each layer increasingly delicate and glass-like; electronics act as an agent of ambiguity, making any definitive form less-so. As the album unfolds, its long arcs take on the quality of sighs, occupying the space between melancholy and contentment.

Still, On Separation is a work of exploration and discovery, more a window into a feeling than a direct representation of the feeling itself. It makes no declarative statements, and does not revel in nostalgia or take it at face value. The opening moments of “Cardinal” features bits of the composition compressed and run in reverse, startling in its immediacy and impact. In those five seconds we feel the rush, but also the uncanny and fleeting nature of this kind of time travel. Just as Stebbins had to find new ways into her old systems in order to resurrect them, we pass through the memory hole from the present, with an eye towards what comes next.

Heather Stebbins is a sound artist who works with acoustic, analog, and digital technologies to make gritty, sparkly, and pressing music.

heatherstebbins.com