I spent a lot of time while working on this album thinking about
impermanence and endings, which led me to change my understanding of
“vanitas” and “memento mori.” These concepts arise allegorically
across classical antiquity and Buddhist thought, among many other
sources, but they were most obsessively expressed during the
Renaissance in still lives and miniatures that contrasted the
simultaneous passing and stillness of time. My interpretation is
completely secular, softer, and more benign, but the awareness of a
moment’s feeling remains. There’s a lot of symbolist imagery in the
work titles, references to place and nature; the “Stations” series in
particular is a reconfiguring of the idea of states of being. The
pervading affect on the album is one that gives reverence to the
suspension, the epoché, a space where we welcome and attempt to
reconcile impermanence. It is an opportunity to go inside—oneself,
one’s sound—in order to simultaneously commune with our comforts and
that which we mourn, perhaps not unlike the function of a hymn.
This article was originally published by Pitchfork.com. Read the original article here.