Spokane - The measure of slowness

The tendency toward slowing down and sonic fragmentation, which led to the identification, in the first half of the '90s, of a new compositional approach applied to "rock", did not produce as its sole legacy the - hugely important - developments generally classified as guitar-based post-rock and slowcore; more or less in parallel with the early steps of the latter, that same approach was also applied to predominantly acoustic singer-songwriter territory, close to broadly folk influences, yet by no means alien to sonic exploration. The early days of the Jagjaguwar label offer a few excellent and little-known examples tied to this approach, found in the sole work by South and in those of their mentor Patrick Phelan, as well as in the four albums of delicate chamber-style electro-acoustic folk released between 1996 and 2000 by Drunk.

It is precisely out of the experience of Drunk that Spokane originated, at first not exactly a proper band with a defined line-up, but rather an artistic project orbiting around the figure of Rick Alverson, already singer and guitarist of Drunk, and open to collaborations with many musicians tied to the shared "scene" and label. Alongside the Richmond-born singer-songwriter, the subtle voice of Courtney Bowles also emerges - already featured on Drunk's last album, "Tableside Manners" - who would later become the core, constant presence of the band, not only increasing her vocal presence but also making an important contribution to the rhythm section.

The first Spokane album is actually a mini-collection of scattered material, as its very title attests: Leisure And Other Songs (eight tracks for under half an hour) was recorded and released almost in parallel with Drunk's final work, from which there are no substantial differences, since that record already showed the band's output declining into territories of soft minimalism, further developed by the new lineup. As many as eight musicians took part in making the album; alongside the still very tentative presence of Bowles, who skillfully gives indefinite shape to Alverson's compositions, there are, among others, Patrick Phelan (piano, guitars, bass) and Via Nuon (Bevel) on electric guitar, himself a collaborator of Alverson's back in the Drunk days.

The outlines of the simple songs on Leisure And Other Songs are always blurred, the vocals subdued and almost detached, while slender melodies, drawn mainly from acoustic guitar and piano, sketch an intimate songwriting that recalls the dry lyricism of Mark Kozelek, yet applied here to narrating stories of everyday ordinariness from a drowsy small-town America, which surfaces in the music through the nostalgic notes of violin, piano and even vibraphone. Indeed, the America Alverson draws on is not that of folk-country roots, nor that of the tortured spleen of classic singer-songwriters, but rather that of contemplating vast, desolate, motionless spaces, whose soundtrack can only be that of a small "chamber band" moving with precise, languid gestures. This, more or less, was the same image often attached to Drunk, and in this respect too the Spokane debut doesn't stray far, despite the slight grace added by Phelan's piano and guitar and the almost explicit echoes of early Low, audible in tracks such as "Dark Eyes" and "The Making Of Americans". Moreover, although the overall pace of the songs remains generally soft and sleepy, slowness has not yet been elevated to an expressive paradigm, since Leisure And Other Songs also contains more varied and structured compositions, such as "By The Bend" and "Automaton".

What this somewhat disorganic collection manages to make clear right away, however, is the poetics pursued by Alverson and the imagery that inspires it, exemplified by the closing lines of the opening track, "Barge": ⟦Q1⟧.

The sheer number of collaborators and the uneven genesis of the first record suggested Spokane might be a one-off project, probably not destined for a life of its own; yet that is not how things turned out, since Drunk was soon definitively dissolved and the new band settled into a trio (Alverson, Bowles and Karl Runge on violin and cello), needing only the occasional support of an electric guitar, and in this core lineup, within the span of a couple of months in early 2001, recorded both an EP and an album. The first, Close Quarters, released as part of the Spanish label Acuarela's mini-album series, shows Courtney Bowles's contribution to the band growing considerably, now handling rhythm parts and glockenspiel and taking a firmer presence on vocals, by now constantly intertwined with Alverson's. Across the EP's five tracks, the band sharpens its leaning toward slow, minimal melodies with immediate emotional impact; yet there's no shortage of surprises, such as a cover of Bauhaus's "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" – rendered here in an ethereal, idyllic guise, interrupted by faint guitar distortions – and above all "Good Fortune", a small gem built from nothing more than hazy rhythms, delicate touches of glockenspiel and chill-inducing strings.

The companion album The Proud Graduates, recorded around the same time, starts from the same premises and settles into roughly the same traits, though with notable differences between its two halves. In the first, melody takes over in extremely delicate, barely-whispered cameos (as in the title track), where the guitar notes thin out and the violin steps in more and more often to lend rhythm and movement to longer, more structured songs than before, in which Alverson's compositional identity comes across as more assertive and defined, proving capable of tackling expressive registers with many different facets, even while bound by the same underlying traits. Proof of this is the use of field recordings of distant voices in the delicate instrumental "Other Rooms", as well as the bucolic romanticism of the splendid "The Absentee", a surprisingly up-tempo track, in which shy electric flourishes, combined with violin and glockenspiel, almost seem to edge toward a light, folk-pop take on Canadian-style orchestral post-rock.

Spokane's remarkably steady release pace continued, less than a year after The Proud Graduates, with Able Bodies, an album made up of just seven tracks and once again around half an hour long, whose production and recording involved Daniel Burton of Early Day Miners. And while a parallel between the two projects could already be drawn in earlier works, with Spokane cast as a sort of mostly-acoustic take on the Indiana band's soundscapes, on Able Bodies that sonic kinship deepens considerably, thanks to Burton's supervision but also to the performing contribution, on violin and cello, of Maggie Polk and Molly Kien, who had by then become permanent members of Early Day Miners around the time of their splendid, contemporaneous "Let Us Garlands Bring".

The fruit of this collaboration is more clearly defined acoustic arpeggios and, above all, more pronounced rhythms, nearly brushing up against post-rock territory on "On The Stair", whose inevitable slowness flows into an almost ambient finale, amid ghostly sounds and stretches, also present on the brief title track. Alverson's by-now consolidated songwriting, shaping ever more subdued, skeletal compositions, is joined on this album by arrangements with distant folk contours, often enriched by the romantic strings of the two precious "guests", now a delicate backdrop to the gentle dialogue between the voices (on the surprisingly sunny "In Houses"), now engaged in hints of acoustic orchestral post-rock ("Quiet Normal Life"), now finally left centre stage in the "chamber"-like close of the final "The Made Bed".

Despite the collaborations and the many references, often left only barely sketched in, Able Bodies doesn't mark a substantial shift in the band's path, still devoted to crafting ever slower, more carefully polished sonic sketches, on which, however, the grafting of extra elements produces a positive effect mostly on the formal level, only partly succeeding in adding real value to Alverson's compositions.

Just over a year passed again after Able Bodies before Spokane returned with a new album and a lineup now settled as a trio, in which Rick and Courtney were now joined by bassist Robert Donne, already active in some Labradford records as well as in the Aix Em Klemm project.

Donne's becoming a permanent member of the band marks a small turning point in the slow evolution of its sound, to which he adds arrangements and harmonic languor, discreetly filtered through synth. On Measurement, however, alongside the novelty of abstract, stretched-out sonic textures comes the total inward turn of Rick Alverson's songwriting, now wholly bent toward an isolationism as much sonic as poetic, in which the shy openings to the outside world found in tracks like "The Absentee" or "In Houses" are almost nowhere to be found. Except for the slightly more defined melodies of "Caution", Measurement comes across as the result of a search for a "ground zero" of slowness and expressive minimalism, in which the recurring themes of time passing and the inevitable impermanence of the real find expression in skeletal songs, often built from just a handful of notes laid over ambient swells and electronically disturbed frequencies, which nonetheless almost never "soil" the slender harmonic weave spun by voices growing ever more ethereal and evanescent, instead merging with them into a single body ("Protocol", "Cities").

Amid enchanted landscapes in slow motion ("Addition"), barely perceptible rhythms and sinister ambient depictions ("An Ideal History", the ending of "Protocol"), Measurement should be regarded as the true sublimation of Rick Alverson's subdued mood and compositional outlook, ever more distant from his remote folk origins and ever more inclined toward a peculiar form of ambient-core, one that joins the common denominator of slowness with introverted songwriting and abstractions poised between acoustic and electronic instrumentation.

This small masterpiece of languid, dreamlike grace was followed by an unusually long hiatus in Spokane's output: nearly four years, during which very little happened, apart from the development of Donne's ambient-electronic solo project, under the name Cristal, and Alverson trying his hand at another kind of slowness through his collaboration with Gregor Samsa, on the album "55:12".

The band's next, fifth album, Little Hours, carries forward and – if anything – intensifies the sonic sparseness and dark mood of the previous record. It is, in fact, a work almost entirely built on suspended time, on the extreme stretching of the gaps between one note and the next, on the patient distillation of sound, made even more solemn by the near-constant presence of the piano, the true protagonist of the album, through bare harmonies of just two or three notes, or scattered sounds, forming the skeleton on which rest the enchanted, barely-sketched melodies of Rick Alverson and Courtney Bowles's voices, ever more ethereal and abstract. Except for the two spectral ambient passages "Building" and "Addendum", every other track on Little Hours is a genuine "song", built with a truly astonishing economy of elements, particularly evident on "Middle School" and "Tell Me", where the piano alone supports the catatonic slowness of the vocals.

Starting from this bare-bones economy of elements, Spokane nonetheless manage to range from "environmental music" to pianistic classicism, from distant slow-core echoes to tentative ambient-electronic manipulations, all the way to understated "chamber" arrangements.

What remains common to all these different expressions, however, is the uniform patina of visionary slowness that marks Alverson's songwriting, traits that reach their peak – formally flawless and emotionally moving – in the few seconds of near-absolute silence that form the keystone of that marvel of understatement titled "Thankless Marriage", where abstraction and the repetition of sounds become one with delicate vocal melodies, slender harmonic lines and string arrangements.

Dark, extremely slow, contemplative, at times disorienting, Little Hours demands attention and patience to be appreciated even more than the albums that preceded it: here Spokane heighten the sheer essentialism of their expressive signature, almost managing to create a disorienting sense of anticipation around every single note, underlining the precious care given to the few elements on which their music is built.

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