Jessica Bailiff - New folk fading into dissolution

A graceful damsel from Toledo, Ohio, Jessica Bailiff is a chanteuse out of time, who enchants with her weightless acoustic caresses, born of an improbable cross between Nick Drake and the slo-core generation (Alan Sparhawk of Low is also her artistic godfather). Music of chiaroscuro and fade-outs, then, where the ghosts of a romantically restless soul flicker into view.

The repertoire on display on her debut album Even in Silence (1998) is a hybrid of the most ethereal dream-pop and the most intimate singer-songwriter folk. Sparhawk's presence shows up mainly in his vocal and guitar contributions, which enrich the record's characteristically acoustic timbre. Bailiff whispers weightless lullabies, with frail melodic threads ("Overcast") and sweet guitar arpeggios ("For You"), but also with a dramatic tension worthy of Neil Young ("Failing Yesterday"). The psychedelic echoes of "One Red Year", filtered through sinister organ tolls, blend with the "disturbed" atmospheres of "The Sordid Light Of Morning", while "Sunshower" and the lengthy "Beautiful Soul" close out the record under the banner of the most bloodless, rarefied folk.

"Alan is 80 percent of the reason I'm still making music today," Bailiff would later explain. "I was lucky enough to have someone I truly admired as a musician take an interest in my work. That's how I overcame my reluctance to share my music with others — it's always been something very personal and intimate to me." And it's Sparhawk again as the eminence grise behind the following Hour Of The Trace (1999), marked by even more sepulchral atmospheres that creep through the dark amid whispers, organ pulses and apocalyptic guitar progressions. Bailiff's litanies are now genuinely sinister, crowded with nocturnal visions, spectral voids and funereal cadences. The "minimalist" "Crush" (with echoes of Laurie Anderson) leads into the whispered dirge of "Toska", which gives way to increasingly "collapsed" atmospheres, in which the listener seems to lose themselves as in a hall of mirrors. The nursery-rhyme quality of "After Hours", barely smudged by a few dissonant guitar notes, and the dark, desolate dreamlike vision of "Amnesia" slow the pace down even further. And just as the music seems about to fade out entirely, the solemn organ cadence of "Warren" arrives, immediately followed by "Across The Miles", in the vein of the tenderest Nico. The long keyboard-and-guitar piece "Perception" showcases the full ambition of Bailiff as a composer, able to move from folk-rock roots toward almost classical avant-garde themes.

The Toledo-born singer-songwriter gradually carves out her own space within the new wave of female American indie artists (Edith Frost, Tara Jane O'Neil, Shannon Wright, Nina Nastasia), while also taking part in the Ghostcar The Radio Entro For Bionic Ears project. Her growth as an artist comes to fruition in 2002 with the self-titled Jessica Bailiff (2002), born out of six months of home recording and meticulous work on sounds and lyrics, alongside Jesse Edwards and Noel Keesee. The result is a poignant record, rooted in intimate, epic and romantic songwriting. The instrumentation grows richer: alongside guitar and drums, there's now an Optigan (a kind of cello), an old drum machine, a '70s mini Korg, a Hammond organ, a "speaker cabinet" and every variety of microphone. Clearer and darker at once, the album leans further into Jessica Bailiff's acoustic side and more experimental ambitions, which she describes as follows: "It's a record that deals with fear, dreaming, the loss of creativity, energy, desire, love and time, with loneliness and distance, with ghosts and with the near-death experiences we sometimes go through." Turbulent lyrics, then, which are nonetheless almost softened by her singing, soft and romantic, and by the music's restraint: "I hope that, in the end, lyrics and instrumentation manage to blend together well," she says. "I think they're one and the same thing. I usually write everything in one go, so I tend to 'refine' the result gradually."

As Chris Nosal wrote in the "Philadelphia City Paper", Bailiff "knows how to blend the best of rock, folk and even sonic exploration into one deep, powerful breath." That's borne out by tracks like the opening "Swallowed", suspended between delicate chimes and guitar arpeggios, or "Disappear", immersed in guitar reverb with Jessica's crystalline voice gently whispering. "The Hiding Place" boasts a magical sitar, with distant sighs and gently caressed guitars. "Time is an Echo" recalls both Nina Nastasia's delicate folk and the more ethereal atmospheres of Sigur Rós, its backdrop of piano, bass and cymbals inducing a sense of trance. The whispers of "You Were So Close" are truly breathtaking, creating a deep, almost intimate connection with the listener. "Mary" is a celestial psalm of rare delicacy. "Disappear" brings to mind the litanies Low lost in the fire, but also echoes of shoegaze and the Velvet Underground of "Venus In Furs". These are narcotic songs, taut and spare "dark" ballads, with flashes of almost mystical lyricism when the violin steps in ("Hour Of The Traces", "Big Hill") or the piano ("The Thief"), but above all quietly suffering, from first to last. A melancholy, wintry record, made for dreaming, but above all for meditation.

Together with Jesse Edwards, Bailiff also created the "Northern Song Dynasty" project, as well as a song for the tribute album released by the Elsie label in memory of one of her mentors: Nick Drake.

Feels Like Home, released in 2006, serves as the perfect synthesis of Bailiff's artistic journey. The usual well-established framework is in place: diaphanous vocals, backed by drones and acoustic-guitar embroidery, over which synths, piano, strings and percussion occasionally layer. The folk approach, however, has taken the upper hand, paring back the embellishments and digital effects of her earlier work (including her releases as Clear Horizon, alongside David Pearce of Flying Saucer Attack). Bailiff has also gained considerable confidence as a singer, to the point that her voice has now become the central element of the songs: she can ride the turbulence of passion ("Evidence") but also thin herself down to a pure angelic whisper ("What's Inside Your Mind?"), even if she doesn't quite reach the celestial breath of an Enya or an Elizabeth Fraser.

It's the chimes of a dusty piano that introduce the first "vision", "What's Inside Your Mind?", which immediately induces a sense of trance and oblivion, with its disorienting backing vocals and feverish guitar flourishes. The lullaby that follows, "We Were Once", resting on a bed of arpeggios, reveals Bailiff's two faces: the straightforward one, in the almost "pop" chorus, and the eccentric one, in the arrangements and the unexpected instrumental coda.

The sense of archaic magic à-la Vashti Bunyan that hangs over the whole record pervades moments of joyful melodicism, such as "Lakeside Blues", a gorgeous medieval litany nonetheless steeped in hippie-folk aromas, in both sound and lyrics (“Body of water/ You and me/ We sing/ We swim”); and then there's "Pressing", a solemn-breathed chant set to the cadence of guitar strings, the radiant "Brother La", built entirely on vocal interlocking, and "Spiral Dream", an oneiric, chanted piece in pure dream-pop style, floating on clouds of ambient effects, field recordings (including a spoken passage in Russian) and clusters of voices. On skeletal madrigals like "Persuasion" or "With You", the sound at times grows so bloodless it borders on stasis. The instrumental "Cinq", on the other hand, harks back to the rarefied electronics of her early work, letting a lovely piano sonata float over a vortex of drones and distortion; but it's "If We Could" that pushes furthest into post-shoegaze territory, raising a dizzying wall of distortion and noise.

Half an hour of limpid, elusive songwriting, wrapped in a cocoon of unfathomable femininity. Unlike many of her peers, Jessica Bailiff isn't driven by narrative urgency; she's in no rush to say everything at once. Hers is a world of half-light, to be discovered over time, with patience and dedication. But perhaps that's precisely the secret of her appeal.

The near-total silence that followed Feels Like Home — aside from the split EP with Annelies Monseré and her contribution to "Dark Enough For Stars" by Au Revoir Borealis — is broken by a short EP released in just a hundred copies as part of Distant Noise Records' 2008 series of monthly releases.

Over the course of just thirteen minutes and five tracks, Since Always offers a broad yet concise overview of Bailiff's musical range, through lo-fi twists of homespun psychedelia worthy of Charalambides, ambient snapshots and graceful acoustic drift. What the five tracks share is undoubtedly a slow layering of sound, an incremental build that's either wrapped in sinister electric iterations or only partly spelled out in acoustic hints with a vaguely folk flavor, in songs not fully developed yet already dense with an ethereal allure (particularly the enchanting "Dear One").

Despite having all the hallmarks of a minor work, Since Always stands as further proof of the class and versatility of an artist perfectly at ease applying her muffled psychedelia equally to lo-fi experimentation and to more intricate melodic fragments.

For her return to the long-form record, we have to wait until 2012, when Jessica Bailiff hunkers down in her home studio to give shape to the ideas that took form during the European tour alongside her partner Mat Sweet. As usual, the approach on At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky is unadorned and direct, even though the richness and variety of the sound — mixed, this time, by Odd Nosdam — suggest that its nine tracks are the product of an extremely careful and rigorous production, this time geared toward giving body to thick electric atmospheres.

The most striking feature of the record is immediately the directness of tracks like "Take Me To The Sun", whose heavy reverb and insistent drum machine even recall the Jesus & Mary Chain, and the blazing closing pair "Slowly"-"Firefly", in which a buoyant, Stereolab-like analog circularity follows almost seamlessly from a relentless series of hypnotic guitar surges. Traces of folk fascination can still be found throughout the record's nine tracks, immersed in the progressively thickening electric torsions of the opening "Your Ghost Is Not Enough" or rendered in the ethereal piano opening of "Goodnight".

The central part of the record proves more reflective and enveloping, revealing a certain cross-contamination with Mat Sweet's restless sensibility, in the form of spectral atmospheres and sharp electric edges. If the first impact of At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky strikes for its cascades of feedback and pronounced melodic framework, it's the richness of its sonic content, expressed across a multitude of facets, that makes Jessica Bailiff's return feel like proof of a class and expressive intensity that time hasn't dispersed but distilled into a vibrant gallery of fully realized songs.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo ("Since Always" and "At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky")

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