Joan Mitchell made a name for herself in the art world through her large scale paintings featuring gestural, emotionally charged mark making. Working mainly as an abstract-expressionist, her paintings vibrate in her use of color and the movement of brushstrokes across the canvas. Though her paintings appear to be non-objective, as one spends time with them, a sense of depth and space, of place starts to form. “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me,” she wrote to a friend in 1958, “and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.”
El Prado, the new album from Portland resident Eli Goldberg’s Ann Annie project, likewise evokes memories of landscapes. Most tracks have simple titles—“the ocean” or “slow river”—while Ann Annie’s Bandcamp bio simply reads, “a beautiful landscape.”
The album cover captures wind moving across a grassy hillside in ways reminiscent of director Hayao Miyazaki, another artist deeply interested in the small beautiful moments of landscape. “I wanted to name [and] center the record around a meadow or field.” Goldberg told the Mercury.
“On a separate note, I am an adoptee and my birth family’s last name is Prado. I found [that] out while researching my last name and learning it means ‘the meadow.’ [This was] after deciding the theme of the record.” Prado as both the landscape and part of Goldberg’s personal history reinforces the idea that humans carry landscape within them; it influences our daily lives, our subconscious grabbing at color and texture. The modern landscape of grocery stores and billboards exhausts us with a barrage of information, while natural landscapes allow the mind a chance to breathe.
Ann Annie’s debut album full length, 2018’s Cordillera, is a collection of woozy, dreamy synth recordings. By his fifth full length, 2024’s The Wind, live instrumentation through a classical lens, and hints of folk music had taken over the songs.
El Prado reaches back to those early recordings. “I was listening to a lot of the stuff I first recorded as Ann Annie, and wanted to sort of ‘go back’ to some of those techniques and recording styles. This record is sort of a reflection back to some early styles, while also applying a lot of the stuff I’ve grown into.”
That mindset—of looking back at the past and applying it to the present—results in a beautiful, gentle album. Recordings that bloom with multiple ideas flowing alongside one another, even as they tend towards the minimal.
Notions of place are complicated: There is the idea of a place, there is the memory of a place, there is the actuality of a place. The songs on El Prado dwell more in the ideas and memories and emotions of places. “I have recorded out of whatever home I’ve been living in, and so the sounds of the apartment or street, or roommates [impact] my creative process.” The actuality of place manifests itself in the recordings, from incidental background sounds that can be mistaken for nature field recordings, to the playing itself. “Not wanting to disturb [neighbors], the playing and writing ended up being as soft and quiet as I could play. As well as fairly minimal.”
Pushing against those abstract notions of place and the sounds of recording environments, El Prado has its anchor points. The song “the meadow” features vocals from Greta Kline of the band Frankie Cosmos. The inclusion of vocals lends the track a gentle, folk-like quality, reminding the listener that though these songs could pop up on an ambient playlist, they draw influence from other sonic worlds as well.
There is a strong interest in classical music as well, “[The] whole record is heavily influenced by Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto. The ending of “for violet” directly references the end of [the concerto’s] 2nd movement.” Goldberg reflects, going on to say, “Originally, and as a long term goal, I wanted to write ‘for violet’ as a much longer symphonic piece, perhaps with multiple movements.”
A few years ago, a friend and I stood watching a large apartment complex being built next to a highway. The apartments were so close to the thoroughfare that we talked about the rush of cars soon to be ever present in the lives of the building’s future inhabitants. We had both lived in similar places, and understand how the mind begins to adjust to sounds around it. That the sounds of cars can start to sound like a rushing river. The not-landscape becomes an imagined landscape. “I’m on a fairly busy street and the waves of cars rushing by [are] present in almost every track I record.” Goldberg waxes. “I almost named the record The Ocean because of this.”
The second to last track, “slow river” distills all of these themes. It’s a short song, as are most included in the album’s track list. But for all its brevity, there is more going on than one might initially think. There’s the sound of passing cars that could be mistaken for a body of water. The song captures the dreamy nature of Ann Annie’s more synth-focused songs while weaving live instrumentation throughout. It’s that moment of stepping out into the fresh air, breathing it all in, and an indescribable feeling comes over you.
You take in where you are. The memories and feelings of where you’ve come from, all the parentheses of your past (both closed and open) getting layered, one over the other. You breathe it in, and then you breathe it out.
Jonathan Ludwig
Source link