Experience the Magical, Luminescent New Album by Mars Smith

I have recently concluded that there could have been no greater aspiration in my life than to be the kind of person who talks about the Civil War on CSPAN on a Saturday morning.

But before I wrestle with the crepe-skinned demons of things I could have done (or might still do?) to have made this estimable goal a reality, I would like to talk about a recent and goddamn wonderful record that you may have overlooked. 

Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind by Mars Smith (Daniela Mars and Paul Smith) is an album that affirms the ability of music to create magic, to send sprays of fog across low and high domed skies, to recreate that moment you saw the night dissolving into the dawn while gazing from an elevated spot across a near-sleeping foreign city, or was it a luminescence-tossed ocean? Mars Smith revel in the ability to wrap the listener and our sparking, arching frightened souls in the kind of joy you experience when you voyage into a land where musicians make music for exactly the right reason: To create an ecstatic experience for themselves and offer these creations to the world, with humility and excitement. Yeh. 

Only someone ignorant or cruel would label what the remarkable, deeply sensitive, gifted yet almost feral/ancient flautist Daniela Mars does as “ambient.” Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind, the latest in a continuing collaboration with pianist Paul Smith, is full of grace and tension, spirals of breath, spit and air. It is the sound of sea fog in the sunlight, and it reminds us we are good and bad and bad until we choose non-attachment. The nine carefully sequenced tracks of Faroe Island grab you with the fingers of moths and sirens, achieving a sort-of circa ’71 Floyd-ish tension, silence, and drama without ever using a guitar or drum. Mars and Smith constantly evoke place and memory, mourning and rebirth, regret and promise, and virtually every second of it engages you to meditate in an electric, engaged way: this is not background music, it is foreground music, it dares you to hear decades of your own thoughts. 

Yes, but what does it sound like? Skeletal melodies of flute and piano projected on the clouds; sound and noise that could be made by nature or radio, drifting across the fog, filling you with thumbless memory (am I in a crib, or am I in a dream, or am I confusing memory for movie?); music that is so tiny it is gigantic, music that sounds like the taste of the back of the most beautiful and exotic stamp ever printed; empty/full puffs of space and composition that sound like the Braille transcription of the goosebumps on the forearms; the breath and impression of memory, without the memory; music with no music except the heart and soul’s intention to make music. Man, this is a powerful album. Smith plays as if the ear were the fingers and the heart was the ears; which is to say he exists somewhere between the god-like Roedelius (the godfather of non-ambient “ambient” music, Eno’s Eno), the magic sensitivity of instrument of Vikingur Olafsson, or the presence presence of Maurizio Pollini; which is all to say, ears, ears, ears, ears, heart, ears, space, instrument, instrument, melody grabbed from the sky and the seaspray and the soil and edited by joy and tears, space, ears, and fingertips in service to all these things. Which is all to say, Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind sounds like a tiny opera about the most beautiful thing you ever saw that on reflection, you’re not sure you actually saw. 

Admittedly, the Punk Rocker in me might prefer Daniela Mars’ 2023 (solo) album, Reverence for the Moment (which I rated, alongside Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom, as one of the best albums of last year), because that showcased her near-miraculous mastery of the contrabass flute, an instrument that summons angels and devils and mountains and sewers all at the same time, and which creates the kind of harmonies you imagined only existed in Shambhala. Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind exists in a less stygian place, and in a more dream-like interior space that expands outward to an upward to horizon and sky; and when it reaches its’ peaks (like on “Fossa” or “Here be Mermaids”, both of which climb stairways to the clouds and don’t come down), Faroe Islands is ecstatic and exquisite and makes you forget that it’s made by man/woman. When you surrender to this album, you will find a majesty and miracle of experience, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard the wind and the horizon-less fogged sea ever described in music so well. 

VIDEO: Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind trailer

And, yeh, to underline, Faroe Islands is not ambient, it is persuasive. I mean, it’s only ambient if you consider the Vorspiel of Das Rheingold ambient (the root of all VU/Conrad/La Monte Young drone heavenhell!), or Umma Gumma, Meddle, or even Sister Bloody Ray ambient, because Faroe Islands sticks a hand into your open chest and grabs your heart between thumb and forefinger and massages you to memories of this life, the last one, and the next one. Daniela Mars and Paul Smith make music of magic and memory that constantly takes you, again and again, to that place where your uncle said, “I’ve got your nose!” and you believed him. 

Faroe Islands: Echoes on the Wind is very much the kind of music you hear in your head when you’re at the precise moment of a whiskey drunk when it peaks into that kind of quasi-psyilocybin temple-push ecstasy, when your sinuses are geniuses and you can see through time and walls, right before it becomes too much; and this is what you hear: air and magic, melody and air and magic, the angels singing with their hands full of soil and their mouths full of Marlboro smoke and IPA; and time pulls apart and you can hear the song within the song, the lips an eyelash hair from the flute and the fingers so close to the piano keys that the keys vibrate with promise and tension, ohyeh. 

And let’s just end there. 

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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