Olivia Block: Of Elks and Gray Wolves
The Chicago-based composer on mountain stories, analog organs and her return to singing
In the summer of 2022, Olivia Block was staying up in the mountains of northern New Mexico, when local news reported that the first Mexican gray wolf had been seen in the area for over 90 years.
This female wolf named Asha was tracked with a radio collar – her journey had begun hundreds of miles away, in southeastern Arizona. She was traveling northward, wandering far outside the wolf recovery area she was expected to stay in.
Block had been coming to the Southern Rockies for many years. A forest fire had recently devastated the area. People as well as animals lost their homes. “Parts of the forest had swaths of charcoal skeleton trees”, she recounts.
During her last stay in winter, she witnessed a herd of elks roaming around, coming down from higher elevations in search for food. She wondered if there was a connection between these elks and the female gray wolf, looking for food so far north of her pack.
Local environmental groups tried to persuade authorities to let Asha roam freely in the area, but as local ranchers felt their animals were threatened, she was captured and brought to a national wildlife refuge, south of Albuquerque.
“This wolf’s story became a larger, more complex story about how natural animal migration patterns collide with state protections and the interests of humans and food production”, Block says. “All my observations from that area became an interconnected map of mountain stories in my mind, which then manifested in the lyrics and titles on the album.”
The resulting record, The Mountains Pass, was just released on Oren Ambarchi’s label Black Truffle. It’s Olivia Block’s first full-length since 2021’s acclaimed Innocent Passage in a Territorial Sea, which came out on Lawrence English’s Room40.
It’s also the first time in over 25 years that the renowned electroacoustic composer is making use of her voice as an instrument.
In the opener “Northward”, she is singing from Asha the gray wolf’s perspective.
As a young artist in 1990s Austin, Block sang in art rock bands, but by the end of the decade, she had switched her focus to sound art and musique concrète.
Moving to Chicago, a hub for experimental music, she released her first instrumental solo album Pure Gaze in 1998 and never looked back.
While working on The Mountains Pass, Block – now in her mid-fifties – felt a change happening.
“I had become increasingly interested in taking the abstractions of sound art and combining them with songwriting and singing again”, she says. “When I was younger playing in bands I felt like singing lyrics trapped the music I was making into a narrative formula. Now I want to explore placing fragments of narratives into larger frameworks of sounds, both musical and non-musical.
I am okay with the fact that my vocal range is small. I don’t feel like I need to be a good singer as maybe I used to feel back then, so songwriting feels less fraught now. I also feel that any of these albums I make might be my last because maybe I will just start doing something else in my later years, so I don’t feel as much pressure as I did when I was younger.”
The new work was recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio. Besides re-introducing her singing voice, Block added the experimental rock and jazz drummer Jon Mueller into the mix, while the base layer consists of warped analog organ and fragmented piano tones.
The press release suggests Italian prog composers like Franco Battiato – more specifically his 1974 album Clic – or Arturo Stalteri as reference points, as well as the chamber jazz of Janet Sherbourne, composer Arnold Dreyblatt’s 1995 album Animal Magnetism, and Gastr del Sol’s avant-garde rock on Upgrade & Afterlife (1996).
While all these comparisons might seem apt in different ways, Block’s use of analog synthesizers has slowly been developing over the last couple of years. In this regard, her last album Innocent Passage in a Territorial Sea marked a turning point.
Discovering the Korg CX-3 tonewheel organ at Chicago’s Experimental Sound studio, she immediately loved the warmth of its sound. “It was supposed to be a knockoff of a Hammond B-3, but more portable”, she explains. “Although it’s an analog synth organ, so it’s still huge, heavy and very fragile.” When someone she knew was selling his CX-3, she purchased it – and then another one, as a backup.
“During the lockdown I experimented with the lowest tones of the organ, their possibilities for communicating a somatic listening experience. I repeated simple patterns in the lowest register of the organ, and I could feel each tone in a slightly different way physically. I had also experimented with the mellotron at Electrical Audio, which was broken. The warped aspect became a fascination for me and I started detuning tones and making that a stylistic part of the sound. Those experiments later resulted in Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea.”
Speaking about the process behind her earlier concrète works – like her stand-out piece Karren from 2013 –, and the more melodic compositions on her last albums, Block explains her recent shift towards song-based works.
“The sound art process requires rigorous attention to detail and many iterations – tons of editing, listening, then editing again”, she says. “I spend a lot of time in my studio toggling between different DAWs and can have up to 40 sessions for each piece. In fact, one reason I have turned to more melodic, song-based music is because I feel like that obsessive process of editing started making me kind of unhealthy. Recently I started asking myself, why am I sitting inside without seeing the sun for days and days at a time making tiny edits for sometimes little to no money? It just seems less fun lately and kind of sickening.”
In more than one way, the move towards songs seems like a quite deliberate approach, even though she’d normally gravitate to more abstract pieces. “Out of all of the aspects of music, melody feels the least natural for me”, she admits.
For the past two years, she has been learning how to play boogie-woogie, blues and honky-tonk piano music, grounding her in fundamental melodic and harmonic patterns. She says she can appreciate them now in a way that she couldn’t when she was younger: “There is something poignant about learning this music, such a big part of the musical culture in America, when this country is in decline.”
The Mountains Pass seems to encompass all these aspects – the ongoing environmental crisis, the economic realities of being an experimental artist, the cultural decline of the West – in its challenging compositions. At the same time, it’s truly an engaging listen.
In letting go of her own ego and ambition, as well as ignoring outside expectations, Olivia Block has found a way of making artful and sophisticated but non-academic, emotionally captivating music.
Here’s hope this outstanding album won’t be her last, when in fact it seems like she has never been in better creative form.
Media Diet
Listening: Still House Plants – If I don’t make it, I love you (2024)
Everyone is going mental about this London-based art school rock trio, at least so it seems in my little weird music bubble. The band’s third album in ten years of its existence is currently lauded in all the right places. Take it from someone who tends to be overskeptical about any kind of hype, even in the most marginal sphere: Yes, it’s really good. Their minimalist, expressive take on post-/math rock features a distinct voice, angular guitars and jazz-inspired drumming. High replay value.
Reading: Fanny Chiarello, Basta Now (2024)
Long overdue, this book puts the spotlight on women, trans and non-binary artists in experimental music – a ‘genre’ that has historically been quite male-dominated. Released on Permanent Draft, an imprint the French poet Fanny Chiarello runs with Italian musician Valentina Magaletti, this is not an attempt at an encyclopedia, but follows a more explorative approach. Hundreds of short bios are ordered by loose themes, and longer thematic essays alternate with plain lists of names, albums and pieces. One to browse through and randomly dive deeper into. I’m sure it will stay with me for some time.
Concerts
The Necks (Berlin, Heimathafen, 23.04.24)
I’m aware that Australian jazz-not-jazz trio The Necks have been around for decades. Still, I wasn’t aware of such a loyal fanbase in my hometown. Heimathafen, an off-theater in Neukölln, was packed to full capacity with all seats occupied and many more people standing in the back. As usual, they played two fully improvised sets, moving from calm ambience to intense catharsis, to standing ovations. I bought their most recent CD Travel at the merch stand.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
Just listened to the Olivia Block album. Really astounding.
Beautiful 🗻