noveller: glacial glow

Loneliness and austerity seem to be the driving forces behind Noveller, the one-woman project of Brooklyn’s Sarah Lipstate. Everything about her musical persona is connected with solitude: shows performed alone with only her instruments; the imagery found in the names of her releases – desert fires, red rainbows, and now a glacial glow – which evoke only thoughts of absence and abandonment; and, most importantly, the structure and consistency of her music, which is shaped around the sound of a single guitar. Granted, that sound is echoed, destructed, fragmented and evolved from simple melody into a tame beast of droning lullabies, but its solitariness is inherent and of an intentional and soothing kind; even though Lipstate’s compositions may sound blue or even dark, their loneliness is wanted, welcome, and used to instill a deep focus on the humble guitar and its many possibilities.

Compared with Lipstate’s earlier works, this second full-length is more diverse and melodic. Where she used to experiment more openly with intensity, texture and form, Glacial Glow finds her focusing more on the smaller details and on creating a sense of natural flow within and outside of each composition. This ability to see the bigger picture and the interconnection between its fragments makes the album compelling, and somehow easier to digest and understand without ever being straightforward or simple; Lipstate plays with nicely contrasting elements right from the beginning. The album deals with icy coldness, but the sound of the guitar layered into a short and pastoral melody in the introductory ‘Entering’ is warm and inviting, as if Lipstate were welcoming us into the hot heart of an Icelandic glaciovolcano. Combined with the yearning sound of an amplified, e-bow picked guitar, the ever-rising melody evokes a graceful simplicity.

Surprise and mild shock are frequent intruders on the otherwise cosy nature of Glacial Glow, and the pleasantries of ‘Entering’ are more than compensated for by the melancholy minimalism of the following pieces. Lipstate’s modus operandi is to start with a simple motive and gradually evolve into a full and complex web of reverb, echo and layers of non-linear guitar lines. Applied in ‘Glacial Wave’ and ‘Blue’ through the use of unexpected drones and raw beats, they exhibit Lipstate’s still-burning passion for sonic adventure and unlimited experimentalism. Her imagination is most developed in the cinematic ‘Alone Star’, whose title is a clue to the song’s Wild West influences, and the spare and economical ‘Waxwing’, where the guitar’s strings and body serve as a means of percussion.

Glacial Glow plays like a very lyrical story punctuated with clouds of dreamy passages and flickers of darkness, the latter very evident on album centrepiece ‘Resolutions’. Here, Lipstate mixes sonic minimalism with emotional dolour as she meditates over a long, eerie wail of droning guitar, showing not only her flexibility as an arranger but also as a player at her best. Sadly, it’s a story that ends too soon, concluding after just thirty-five minutes of narration with the aptly named ‘Ends’ with a smart, soothing motive that could be played forever. Lipstate closes the album in the same manner as she’s built it – from a single sound – with the inner thrill of an expected climax and a contrasting longing for harmony and calm.

[Saffron Recordings/Weird Forest; May 30, 2011]

Written by: Tomas Slaninka

Tags: glacial glow, noveller, sarah lipstate

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 2:27 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.