Rambling #19

Or should I call this a parenthesis

Today I went for a walk that landed me some mile uphill. I don’t really understand people who can walk up hills without breathing heavily, or without contorting the body to some dastardly angular form. These walks have changed names over the years but largely have always had the same effect, even if their moments themselves have shifted.

I used to play pokemon go and would use these walks to frantically get all that I could accomplish in terms of steps and catches. Then I realized I could simply read and walk, opting to head down long, mostly straight roads through suburbs, where I could read and step without fear of landing my shoe in a pile of dog poop while I was distracted. Now I mostly walk because my body yearns to move out of itself. Hot girl walk, mental health walk, spiritual expansion walk.

The album INITIATION by the artist Sophiye Soliveau has been on repeat for me often these last few weeks. Coaxing the body out of itself.

I can’t say I really listened to much R&B, jazz, soul, or otherwise prior to Heather and I’s move back up to Seattle last year. You know, occasionally the soft soundtrack for an introspective walk, but I think one’s twenties are so full with powerful emotions and powerful changes that it doesn’t feel as though really there’s much time or room for things that don’t explode in your ears.

Now the effects of living in a world that’s been at war for longer than half my life, the effects of witnessing a genocide happening in real-time as 10% of the population of Palestine has already been killed, has me wishing for as few additional explosions as I can allow in a day.

What Soliveau offers as an artist is an introspective flowing movement of music, bewitching you into a type of sensational tenderness. I feel this even reading so many of her various artist statements and biographies throughout the read. She comments and describes herself through existential modes like being and lightness or “She extended her body in sound territory, in that of the harp and its precision, which she shaped into more Soul lands, to water her own way of the R’n’B.”

I love this depiction through a concert she held in France, for instance:

Sophye’s creations, written and composed mainly at night, emerge from the need to transcend her sorrows and share the emotions that run through her. She celebrates joy and explores trance, always in search of an intense, immersive sonic experience, whether solo, in a trio or sextet, or as part of the group Ábàjade , an 8Tet of jazz fusion and Cuban tradition, in which she recently made her mark.

…

Collective creation, improvisation and the involvement of the body in the work of voice and music are the very essence of her approach with the different ensembles.

The something about the harp-voice combination that Soliveau achieves is this teasing balance between desire and gratification, yearning and absence, security and fluidity. In a way, poetry. After all, while the poem is a gift of language, poetry is eternal and everywhere around us. And what is sound, music, if not a continuation and extension of language?

I’d recommend this album if you’re tasked with something that you don’t especially need your brain for. Mostly because I’d rather you devote your brain and your energy to the act of listening through these songs. It’s thirty minutes, after all, and certainly you have that kind of time, no?

If not, allow me to be the first to tell you, you deserve a life where you can spend thirty minutes enchanted on any given day.

You can listen to the album here: INITIATION on Spotify