ALBUMS: Reverence for Daniela Mars
Digging into the true flute-based banger of 2023
Very little is more impactful than something that is mysterious yet familiar.
I invite you to listen to one of the stunning, shattering, uplifting and inspiring albums of 2023: Reverence for the Moment by Daniela Mars.
My god, it is wonderful to hear something that makes you believe. Believe that music can change us. Move us. Scratch and challenge our heart. Inspire us to imagine a world full of starspray and luminescence. Create a space for our hearts to expand, explore, ask questions, give answers.
Daniela Mars is a contemporary flautist who builds ancient and modern spaces, shambhalas, perispheres, arctic ice-stations, Bayou ice houses, skyscrapers, launchpads, cardboard box forts, and Wiltshire long barrows out of (largely) low and extraordinary alto, bass, and contrabass flutes. This is music built out of the very human breath, music that is hushed, but enormous, that demands attention, but makes attention easy. It may be slightly difficult to describe Reverence and the work of Daniela Mars. What if Eno, Gabriel Olafs, Roedelius, Pauline Oliveros or Thurston Moore played flute? Well, maybe, maybe that’s a start, yeh, but Mars is the entry to another world, where skill allows invention and invention transcends skill, where an artist is less interested in displaying expertise than displaying an ability to use sound to reveal the heart and transcend time and place.
Artist: Daniela Mars
Album: Reverence for the Moment
Label: VOCES8 Records
★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Mars and Reverence for the Moment is joyful, inventive, introspective, respective of the eternal drone without being attached to it (Mars summons the nursery rhymes of Ra, the solar friction of Sun Ra and the acid-slowed horn-and-hurricane blow of Rampart Street, all while describing the color of the moon). It sometimes reminds me, gorgeously, of the cavernous/planetarium soundscapes and calls to memory of James Tenney and especially Stuart Dempster (Stuart Dempster transcribes the space around the place between places; Daniela Mars performs dances, salutes, lullabies and pop songs in those places). It defies easy classification – it’s certainly not ambient, and likely not classical, though those are obvious/too-easy entry points — while also inviting the listener in to share in this extraordinary journey. Perfectly, it is artistic without being arty, and on Reverence for the Moment, we transit from moments of extraordinary, aching, buttery, beautiful and bittersweet melodicism to scrapes of dirt and adventure.
Mars often explores the low-end of the spectrum – the contrabass flute is a rare and impossibly evocative instrument – but she uses it to conjure grace and slow, drifting melodicism, which she further describes with the other flutes in her arsenal, building something with the stepped, Escher via Calder breathy spaces of serial composition, but without the dissonance. Her music sounds like a dream of the milky way dreamt underwater (I’d say that’s the best way to describe it), and it never seems forced or strange (even on a track like “60mm,” which appears to actually employ words whispered into instruments, and in its’ movements and moods has the feel of a “road” song or travelogue). Like Dempster – who uses the trombone and other wind instruments in a somewhat similar, revolutionary, utterly mesmeric way), Mars creates music that reflects every aspect of our relationship with sound, from Stonehenge to Satanic Mill to Sputnik and before and beyond, from nursery to hospice. Mars, however, performs on a both a more intimate and more melodic level than Dempster (who, primarily, works with the gigantic, and the environmental), and unlike Dempster, can apply her skills and invention to tradition composition, as she did on her majestic and moving 2018 album, Works for Bass Flute.
Reverence for the Moment exists in a visceral, gorgeously primal place while also being, well, tuneful and a delight to experience. It is the alphabet song, transcribed, with each letter standing for an entire kalpa, or maybe just an entire day at nursery school when you were happy before words. It is the sound of something that is rich in collective memory; not only that, but it is also the sound of memories we did not have language to label, say, the hum of trucks on a far-off highway, heard from the swaddle of the crib at dawn; that is the sound of Reverence for the Moment. It is also the sound we imagined the censers in church made as they waved mystical incense above our tiny heads, or the echo of the Shofar, or the unnamed, unknown vibration, mechanical or seismic, across the hill and across the hill’s hill. Daniela Mars’ music is memory, memory, memory; it is the grace of the aged and the wide eyes of pre-language childhood. It is the devils and angels of sleep; it is the young and old eye searching for the first milk-black-blue of dawn’s embryo that tells us night will end. Reverence for the Moment feels so natural to the heart and ears that it almost defies being labeled music; it is the ancestral memory, tuned, it is the hum of the plugged in, postindustrial world: all those lightbulbs and refrigerators and HVAC systems that sing constantly, tuned, it is us, forced to listen to silence, and the noise of silence. Now, none of that is to say that (virtually) any of this is amelodic or dissonant; Mars has a commitment to grace that makes what could be desperate or quirky gorgeous and deeply emotional.
I am interested in music that lifts me, that fills me with imagination and helium, words without memories and memories without recognized reality. Music is not merely a mnemonic; it should also elicit memories we did not yet have words for, feelings we cannot articulate, and landscapes and past and future lives we imagine in our sleeping dreams and waking fantasies. Daniela Mars makes music that sounds like the way air smells after a quick, bright rainstorm. When you look up, way up, into the high winter sky on an impossible clear and cold day, you know how the air seems to dissolve into a blue so bright and white it seems like crystal smashed and suspended? That’s what Reverence for the Moment sounds like. It sounds impossible because it rebuilds memory before words, even before our incarnation, but it sounds possible because it is so natural, so familiar.
(Sometimes) Music should be about a place we cannot name and which has not been visited by Beatles or even Lou (but maybe the Feelies flew over it once or flew under it because it was at the blurry, snowy pale opal edge of the Karman Line). Music should be the language of transmigration. This is Daniela Mars’ Reverence for the Moment (and also another literally breathtaking new album by the Mexican neo-Krautrock band Mirror Revelations called Aura, but we shall discuss this another time). I call this Music for the Opera based on In Event of Moon Disaster. Because: We dream of the stars, and in doing so we must we defy our lifetimes and we look at our deaths and a millions years before our death, so we see eternity; we see the gibbous of science, when it was just hope, before it was death; we see the brilliance of Trinity but do not yet smell the burning flesh; we need music of death-defying, death-reminding luminescent sea colored moondreams; we need to be reminded what Isa saw when he looked at the sky, what Yuri Gagarin saw, too. Bring me the head of Yuri Gagarin, I say, I give you the fallen fingernails of Madame Curie for it, yes; give me the bruised and burst arms of the builders of Avebury, I see their moon, and I raise you, I raise you Dreams of the High Tension Stepdown Transformer, because I am the lineman for the county, I hear you singing through the line, and the music I hear is Reverence for the Moment.
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