Rachel's

Opening all the windows to the sea,

Declining modernity through ancient instruments; expressing an artistic substance that transcends its usual forms.

These two guiding principles might schematically sum up the creative intent behind the music of the Rachel's, an ensemble that coalesced in the mid-90s around pianist Rachel Grimes, featuring, as musicians and producers, key figures from the thriving Louisville, Kentucky music scene.

Already known for the disorienting debut "Handwriting" and the Schoenbergian homage "Music For Egon Schiele", the Rachel's collective arrive at their third album still under the direction of Bob Weston, with a vast lineup (seventeen members) that, alongside musicians of predominantly classical training, includes others who, having set aside all amplification and electric overlay, pair a complex orchestral instrumentation — from the ever-present strings to trumpet, clarinet and timpani — with the only outside contributions coming from a sturdy rhythm section and occasional field recordings.

The starting point for "The Sea And The Bells" is drawn from Neruda's ode of the same name, two lines of which (the same ones quoted here as epigraph) stand at the opening of the elegant booklet accompanying the record, conceived as a sort of ship's log of a voyage set in a past when every journey was an adventure and leaving land symbolized a transition into a reality undefined in space and time. The reference to those lines is thus equally symbolic, not only for the maritime imagery that runs through the album as a guiding thread, but also for the desemanticization carried out here by Rachel's, both in the sense of an expressiveness that goes beyond the very use of words, and in that of a reduction of musical language to primal, seemingly simple structures, in which the boundaries between meaning and signifier shrink until they vanish.

"The Sea And The Bells" is, in fact, a magnificent play of mirrors, reflecting figures by breaking them down and reassembling them in wholly surprising ways, playing with the oxymorons of forms generally considered opposites.

It would hardly be reckless, then, to claim that the essence of the work stems from a foundation rooted in post-punk and noise, filtered however through an unusual chamber-music sensibility and consequently translated into compositions led by strings and piano. The catch-all label of post-rock could easily be applied to "The Sea And The Bells", valid perhaps for the passages with the most pronounced classical contamination, but on its own too reductive to describe the "spirit" that hovers over the album's intense hour-long runtime, emerging clearly in the structure of certain tracks, consistent, moreover, with the artistic biographies of some of the musicians involved here (Bob Weston, formerly of Shellac, Jason Noble and Kevin Coultas of Rodan).

The opening track alone, the gripping "Rhine & Courtesan", is enough to make the mood of the entire work palpable, encapsulating both the Rachel's' expressive intent and the thematic vocation of these compositions: a crystalline melody of piano and strings immediately traces trails of undulating romanticism, tempered by Kevin Coultas's spare rhythms and only briefly interrupted by an interlude of sinister, lurching noise. The band's ability here to combine impressionistic sketches of the utmost delicacy with the martial stride of the rhythm section is extraordinary — a pairing that would seem suited to nervous electric textures, yet proves perfectly fitting for the solemn but restless chamber-music spirit.

If "Rhine & Courtesan" can already be considered a true archetype of Rachel's' music, the album's development is by no means limited to replicating its formula.

It's certainly true that the alternation of harmonic passages with darker, more fragmented ones is reaffirmed in particular in some of the longer, more elaborate compositions ("Lloyd's Register", "Cypress Branches"), but each time in shifting registers and through a kind of interlocking interplay among the various elements. The result is tracks that are never predictable, in which cohesive harmonic layers and luminous romantic interweavings coexist with snapshots of shadowy field recordings ("With More Air Than Words", "Night At Sea", "To Rest Near To You") and moments of genuine instrumental transfiguration, as in the unsettling central section of "Lloyd's Register", overwhelmed, if only briefly, by the violence of distorted strings and spasms of trumpet, and the disturbing screech of violas that erupts on "Sirens", a chilling warning of the vulnerability of the human soul.

Alongside tracks in which the large ensemble plays at the full extent of its instrumental capabilities, there are others involving only a few of the musicians present: this reflects a further push toward expressive minimalism as well as a search for spontaneous solutions, both in the nature of the sounds (especially in the album's second half) and in the distribution of instruments. Such is the case with compositions that lean toward twisted temporal suspensions — where the chamber-music setup gives way to a kind of oblique ambient, furrowed by noise and field recordings — and with those in which the band appears in a lineup reduced to its principal architects, Rachel Grimes and Jason Noble, who on "Tea Merchants" offer a spellbinding five minutes of austere yet touching crescendo, shaken only by faint vibrations, while on the wondrous "All Is Calm" they swap instruments (Jason moves to piano, Rachel to vibraphone), capturing the intimate essence of this work and something of the overall design behind the ambitious Rachel's project.

Everything is calm, indeed, or at least seems so, but beneath the surface of this music there lingers an unspent vital force that draws on the individual artists' experiences and relates them to ancient expressive forms, filtered through a thoroughly modern sensibility, offering clear proof that, if one wants to express something in these years truly capable of upending musical categories, it need not necessarily be conveyed through raw, visceral impact, but can just as well be voiced through a calm that is expansive, moving, and vividly alive.

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04/09/2008