Essential, Magical New Albums from Immersion and Daniela Mars
Two LPs that explore the fearlessness of beauty
Phil Ochs once said, “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.”
Beauty is fearless. Yet:
Today, there is someone who is more frightened than you. Tonight, someone is hungrier than you. Right now, there is someone lonelier than you. There is someone more afraid of eviction, poverty, bankruptcy, exclusion, deportation, oppression.
Put their heart in your hands, just for one moment.
Then: Use your imagination, tender and wild. Imagine the music of your heart, fearless and compassionate, that accompanies the graceful weapons of Empathy and Fearlessness!
Consider: The grace of man, not the arrogant grimace of mankind.
Hey. I know that is not enough, I’m not that dumb, not that naïve. I know that on every level.
Beauty may not “save” us, but the truest beauty is fearless, it stops time and inspires your heart and your deeds. I ask you to allow some of this fearless beauty into your life and heart; it will be a seed for compassion and initiative and engagement, I promise.
The antithesis of horror is beauty, of this I am sure, because we want to hear angels even when golems challenge, yeh? I see an old bitch gone in the teeth, but he (this horror cannot be a woman) holds a scythe, ready to defend his botched civilization. In the shadow of the scythe, I recognize a hunger for beauty that transcends categorization or even our old friend pretension.
After all: listening to John Field’s Nocturnes does not make me feel better about mankind, but it makes me feel better about man. This beast, man, is capable of spinning unspeakable, silken beauty out of the clouds and the empty mind: we create to silence the fears, to distract us, and we create to empower the muscles of correction and action. Yeh? I want to be bathed, saved, balmed and baked by beauty, I want to be engaged by mesmerific songs of wild grace, electric intensity and Tathagatic patience.
So here I tell you of two records of extreme and extraordinary beauty, two record that may not save “us” but may save “you”:
Heartweaving by Daniela Mars and Nanocluster, Vol. 3 by Immersion and SUSS.
If you have ever experienced a significant earthquake (or a noteworthy aftershock), you know there is a peculiar sound GAIA makes. It is virtually indescribable, it is the subwoofer of the planet itself reciting it’s asymmetrical mantra, it is the sound of LIVING DUST rising in surprise and joy to welcome nature’s return to supremacy; it is also the music of your utterly innate fear playing its’ inevitable losing duet with nauture, the Keith Levene sparks of treble trembling in your spinal cord accompanying the Jah Wobble-wobble of the planet. If you have heard this noise, the planet’s song, it’s mocking laughter, it is as unmistakably music as it is indescribable.
On Heartweaving, flautist Daniela Mars sounds like she is transcribing the shaking of the planet and the dust rising from the soil and sand, the sky shaping and reshaping itself in the endless dance of emptiness and interbeing. Yes, uh-huh. It is exactly the album we need right now, because it grounds you and elates you, provides solace and warning.
Daniela Mars specializes in the extraordinary, magical, mysterious Contrabass flute, an object which is, sort of, the Sunn O))) of flutes (although she certainly doesn’t play it exclusively in her work; she also plays “standard” flutes, with great invention and using the flute as an extension of her breath and body). She has made some of my very favorite albums of the last few years (sometimes in collaboration with her partner, pianist Paul Smith). Heartweaving sets the bar even higher: every moment features a strange yet deeply fascinating beauty, sometimes ghostly, sometimes ghastly, the sound of air harnessed to fill the planetarium of the heart and the bed-tent of fears. Far too full of tension and originality of conception and texture to be considered ambient, Heartweaving perhaps makes most sense when aligned with Sunn O))), Earth, Morton Feldman, or even (pianists) Ludovico Einaudi or Hideyuki Hashimoto (come to think of it, I’d say there’s a lot of Feldman here). Yet I also experience the shock of fear, recognition and release I felt when I first encountered Glenn Branca or Tony Conrad, even though Mars uses “little” noise in “large” ways, sort of like sky-written warnings. And although there’s some acoustic and theoretical relation to the work of Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros or James Tenney, Heartweaving’s consistent, almost angry sense of foreboding makes this something alerting and new. Heartweaving is less reliant on melody than much of Mars’ other work; or rather, it redefines melody as something innate, ever present, and ancient, and in doing so, it gorgeously and intensely explores the darkness (and lightness) of spirit that happens when Mars conjures magic from her flutes.
Heartweaving is likely my favorite Daniela Mars album yet. It is full of the tension and the beauty of the age. Clouds turn from hallelujah opalescent to ominous and gray, lullabies arise from nightmares, the landscape shifts from pastoral to satanic, the vibe from elegiac and organic to industrial and ominous, all through the magic of Mars breath, vision, and use of space (both as a compositional device and to create an ambience and setting for the instruments). A wordless story about fear and beauty, so original as to virtually invent its’ own vocabulary and genre, Heartweaving may be an essential album.
And then there was Nanocluster, Vol. 3 by Immersion.
I don’t know if I have words for this phenomenon: What if you were in one of the greatest, purest, and most consistent bands of all time, yet you release music outside that group that is so transcendent that you can forget that band ever existed?
Like Daniela Mars, Immersion — the long-running collaboration between Colin Newman (of Wire) and his creative and life partner, Malkla Spigel (of Minimal Compact et al.) — has been going from strength to strength, and have undeniably – yes, I said undeniably – made some of the very best albums of the last few years. Nanocluster, Vol. 3 (done in collaboration with the environmental americana trio, SUSS) is Immersion’s very best album yet, and is a legitimate candidate for best album of the bloody century. It is also very possibly the single best Krautrock album not made by one of the original group of Krautrock pioneers. It really is.
Nanocluster, Vol. 3 is the open road of dreams, the soundtrack to that charged and empty high you experienced for a few moments once or twice in your life and have been seeking ever since. It is that moment on a nighttime bridge when the lights through the railings caused a zoetrope of bright white and blue and black; it is the rise and fall of Lincoln Highways under a low sky; it is the straight road through glacier-gnawed gorges, and all around you green mountains spit clouds; it is the moments of temporary treasure, transcribed.
Sighing, pulsing, Nanocluster, Vol. 3 is built with the sweet churns and slides of guitars and bubbles of bass and synth, always rocking you in a Dusseldorf cradle…but the autobahn runs arrow straight across the desert, in tune with sky and stars, ringing, roaring, whispering, sighing, singing. Nanocluster, Vol. 3 is also undeniably a rock’n’roll record because it buzzes, rises and excites with dumb angel electricity, exactly like a rock’n’roll record should; which is to say, it transcribes the Neu!/Feelies/Floyd dream of ambient punk and sets it to the pulsing rhythm of the mantra or the breath.
Direct comparison of Nanocluster, Vol. 3 or Immersion itself to anything but Immersion (and the earlier Nanocluster albums) would be, um, interesting but, um, I think facile. Immersion has created its’ own world of persuasive, ear-obsessive engaging planetarium psychodrone, where they seem to transcribe not so much music as the idea of space and the non-attachment beyond and before imagination. On their last album (2024’s Nanocluster, Vol. 2 – actually two joined EPs, to be accurate), I recognized that Immersion had done the nearly impossible: they were becoming as good, as remarkable (as in I WISH TO REMARK UPON THEM!), as essential as Wire, one of the most essential and remarkable bands of all time; and with Nanocluster, Vol. 3 Immersion actually achieve this, they are now as ESSENTIAL (as in everyone who loves the endless spaces and potential of rock combo sound NEEDS to own this) as Wire.
At the risk of violating the state of speechlessness this album sluices me into, I will repeat this: Nanocluster, Vol 3 is the best neo-Krautrock album I’ve ever heard, period – which is to say, of all the ordinary and extraordinary work in the last forty or so years that has tried to evoke, recreate, pay homage to, imitate AND ETCETERA the original Krautrock sounds of the 1970s, this is the best, the supreme, the essential, likely because it’s not an homage, it’s a language all its own, it’s the blue hypnosis of dreams forgotten and dreams uncertain, it is thrilling, it is sad, it is ecstatic, and yes, it is essential. (Again with that word.)
So: So very happy to give you some good news, both small and large. One step for man. A reminder that man is not mankind, but art may fill us with hope, and hope may build the muscles we need. The good news: Immersion and Daniela Mars have made magic amidst the satanic mills of our age. So:
Listen to something you love. It may not save the world, but it might save you so you can save someone.
And I sign off: I am a citizen, confronted by an old bitch gone in the teeth, I hide and rise behind art.
Immersion and SUSS will be performing tomorrow, April 4, at Joe’s Pub at Astor Place in New York City.
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