BON IVER - For Emma, Forever Ago

Footsteps sink into the muffled blanket of snow. A howl in the distance, the shadow of a crow among the branches. Silence speaks the language of those who know how to listen. And solitude can transform itself into the discovery of a forgotten companionship. “Bon Iver is a wish, a celebration and a feeling”. Almost as if the frozen earth held an enigmatic hope within it.

Behind the strange Francophone mangling of good winter lies the secret diary of American songwriter Justin Vernon. A woman broke his heart, his friends turned their backs on him: had he been a Nick Hornby character, he probably would have climbed onto the roof of the House of Suicides on New Year's Eve. Vernon, instead, after the breakup of his band (the little-known DeYarmond Edison), decided to abandon everything and take refuge in a cabin deep in the pristine woods of Wisconsin. And there, unexpectedly, he rediscovered his own face.

Four months of solitude in the mountains, in the dead of winter. Wood to chop, stretches of snow. At first it was simply a need for purification. Then the music began to take a new path, like a memory slowly resurfacing. “I felt like all the blocks I had placed on my mind and heart in terms of musical expression started to melt away”, Vernon recalls. Within the wooden walls of the cabin, with an acoustic guitar, an old tape recorder and little else, his immersion into the subconscious began to translate into intangible notes, marked by a falsetto with an ethereal, otherworldly inflection. Nothing like the emphatic lyricism of Antony: rather, a bold fragility closer to the sensibility of Shearwater.

Almost nothing needed to be added: a touch of drums on “Flume”, the horns that lead “For Emma” to dance on the melancholy carousel rides of The Robot Ate Me's “Carousel Waltz“… A homemade production, yet rich in detail and vocal layering capable of giving every track a surprising sense of communal warmth. Bon Iver's songs, laced with spectral reverb and interlocking alliterations, began to spread through the web, won over the blogs, and achieved the consecration of Pitchfork: and now Jagjaguwar, home to the likes of Okkervil River and Richard Youngs, is preparing to give “For Emma, Forever Ago” an official release in the coming months.

A light guitar step introduces Vernon's hermitage, carrying the wounds of the most rustic Neil Young to streak themselves with rust-colored ripples within the folds of “Flume”. In the silence, voices from beyond the grave echo, yet the rhythm seems to turn almost carefree, like a scarlet watercolor out of “If You're Feeling Sinister“: but there is nothing settled about the melody that the ectoplasm of Vernon's voice conjures in “Lump Sum”. The ancient folk of “Skinny Love”, with its cadence somewhere between a Banhart-esque nursery rhyme and dry bitterness, serves as a prologue to the skeletal gospel of “The Wolves (Act I And II)”, and it's as if Will Oldham were being swept away by a host of angels, in a crescendo where even the planks of the old cabin contribute to the noisy incursions of the finale.

It is a gradual shedding of every burden, this Bon Iver. “Sold my cold knot / A heavy stone / Sold my red horse for a venture home / To vanish on the bow” announces Vernon in “Lump Sum”. Everything that is not essential must be cut away in order to undertake the journey. “I tell my love to wreck it all”, he proclaims in “Skinny Love”, “cut all the ropes and let me fall”.

Only then is it truly possible to reach the heart of the record: first, the repetition of a single note, insistent as rain beating on the windows, accompanies the defenseless tenderness of “Blindsided”; then a Christmas carol as if dreamed up by Tim Burton introduces the whisper of “Creature Fear”, which suddenly opens into a surge not heard since the days of Jeff Buckley; and finally, there is the enchantment of “Re: Stacks”, as delicate as a snowflake before which one can only stand in breathless contemplation.

Solitude becomes anticipation, silence becomes voice. “For the first time I could really listen to myself”, Vernon confesses, “have the time and space I needed to listen to my inner voice”. This is not introspection for its own sake, it is the adventure of discovering one's own self. “This my excavation and today is Qumran”, reveals “Re: Stacks”, comparing Vernon's immersion into his own soul with the excavations in the caves where the scrolls of the ancient Essene community of the Dead Sea were found. This is the essence of Bon Iver's music, as Vernon himself describes it on his MySpace page: “the Qumran excavations, but in the present, and for your heart”. Are you ready to venture into the caves?

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19/11/2007