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In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s Tōhoku region, a resident of the small town of Ōtsuchi opened a public telephone booth in his garden. Inside, a disconnected phone invited visitors to speak their grief aloud, carrying on the wind painful stories that would be near-impossible to let rest anywhere else. Since the installation of this “Wind Phone,” tens of thousands have made the pilgrimage to pick up the receiver and dial into the void.
Natural reactions to disaster might be choked silence, but for the OO-Ray—Portland-based experimental cellist Ted Laderas—making sound is a way forward. On his new album Marginals, Laderas crafts his own mourning calls. Each track is an elegy referencing a specific calamity, some well known, others more obscure. With a little research, one can surmise that tracks “Vajont” and “Tunguska” respond to the 1963 Vajont Dam landslide in Italy and the Tunguska explosion of 1908 in Siberia. Whether the events are familiar or not, the feelings they stir are universal. As both a memorial and a gesture toward processing existential anxieties, the album insists on remembrance as a form of survival.
Marginals is out on Portland-based record label Beacon Sound, whose commitment to sonic experimentation includes work by Cyane (FKA Dolphin Midwives) and Crystal Quartez, and reissues of Terry Riley classics. For Laderas, the album represents a healing process. He daylights as a bioinformaticist and training director at Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center; in Marginals’ Bandcamp liner notes, he recalls battles with writer’s block and stage fright, which led him to host mental health-focused “Ambient Zoom” sessions with other Portland artists during the pandemic. Reading about these vulnerabilities, one wonders: What counts as disaster? How do we show up for ourselves while confronting crises—the genocide in Palestine, climate-driven catastrophes, fascist encroachment—that crush us daily?
One way to investigate these anxieties is through sound. Laderas’ cello has a guttural quality, as if its timbre emerges from somewhere deep in his body—Marginals’ elegies vacillate between these groans and softer sighs. Through a style Laderas calls “shoegazer cello” and “chamber drone,” layered electronics enfold acoustic gestures in a tender, if at times chilling, atmosphere. The cello remains central to Laderas’ ethos, sometimes receding or becoming unrecognizable in ambience. Several tracks feature the instrument prominently, while others lean more heavily into electronic textures, creating a pendulum effect across the record.
Marginals opens with “Floe,” an icecap of piercing electronic chords looping over cold cello humming beneath the surface. Atmosphere deepens on “163,” which locates a spectral, sci-fi unease through Mark Snow-esque waves of echoing electronics. A cloud of high-pitched sonics swells, and one senses the anxieties Laderas describes surfacing and somersaulting across the track.
“Luna Park” offers a cello-forward ode pulling away from strict ambient territory, though it ends somewhat abruptly, a pattern that reoccurs throughout the album. “Tunguska” twinkles, then fades in a raspy gauze that yearns for a little more resolution.
Laderas’ taste for distortion sticks out on “Erebus,” where sinewy cello notes twist into squeals. The effect is a discordant wash that immerses the ear. The pendulum then swings back to the more melodic “Halifax,” where piano and cello loop in a cyclical progression recalling Michael Nyman’s “Fish Beach.” The composition reaches for shimmery alien tones that ease to a finish.
Laderas’ elegiac intent and electroacoustic sensibility call up many influences: Arthur Russell’s avant-pop experiments, Cocteau Twins’ drenched textures and misty atmospheres, and the Books’ collaged approach, with its emphasis on sampling the “marginal” and forgotten. In a recent interview with Foxy Digitalis, Laderas noted that in statistics, “marginals” can refer to casualties in a dataset. “We must never forget that people who died in these disasters were real people, and not just casualties or numbers,” he explains. More obvious ambient figureheads like Pauline Oliveros and her sound-as-spiritual practice loom large, too, and Laderas’ love for My Bloody Valentine is clear in his blurred textures and drone-laden veils.
At first, the absorbing quality of Marginals evoked an auditory planetarium dome. I imagined its songs paired with wide-angle shots of melting ice and Amazon deforestation. A comparison to Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score came naturally, with its hypnotic repetition and spotlight on the overwhelming state of things. But Glass mapped modernity with much more spectacle. Laderas’ distorted cello centers something less grandiose, an internal disquiet that’s difficult to articulate. Koyaanisqatsi caught an aerial shot of life out of balance; Marginals is a close-up of that grief from the ground.
Beacon Sound’s release show for Marginals was an intimate upstairs gathering at Dream House, an Irvington venue where the clatter of the downstairs bar reverberated through the wooden floorboards. Pianist Derek Hunter Wilson opened with a set of Korg keyboard compositions layered with ambient textures; he played with dizzying dexterity, his hands not unlike hummingbirds’ wings. Hrafnamynd composer Patricia Wolf smoothed transitions with meditative DJ sets, and Amulets’ Randall Taylor conjured vaporous auras of sound with a handheld tape recorder and his electric guitar.
When Laderas took the stage, he carried a Soma Dvina, a two-stringed electroacoustic instrument resembling a cross between a zither and a painter’s easel. The mood shifted and quieted. Laughter drifting from downstairs mingled with washes of diaphanous synth and plaintive strings. In a room full of people, I sensed fragility and beauty—in Laderas’ playing, and in the disasters that surround us at all times, from the natural to the terrifyingly human-made.
It may not be the answer to our grief, but on Marginals, Laderas reminds us that music is human, too. That counts for something.
The OO-Ray’s Marginals was released August 15 and can be found on Beacon Sound’s Bandcamp as a digital download or limited edition cassette.
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Lindsay Costello
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