- A stunning synth album that channels the beauty and wonder of the natural world through composition alone.
- Saloli's Mary Sutton cuts through the noise of modern life with a playful, exploratory album about a day in the life of a bear in the Smoky Mountains. Canyon is her second outing for kranky, after her album of "ambient music for hot tubs," The Deep End, back in 2018. Where that album sought to provide a sonic palette for quiet gatherings of people in bubbling water, her latest delves into her rich cultural heritage as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Fully composed and recorded live on a Sequential Circuits MultiTrak synthesiser and routed through a delay pedal, Canyon is an environmental record that shares a lineage with the sonic landscapes of late ambient pioneer and fellow Oregonian Ernest Hood. The Cherokee belief that there is no essential difference between humans and animals is experienced subjectively as you listen. All the while you're listening to a story about a bear and a frog and a bird flying in the night—but you are each of those entities, too.
Though Sutton fully notates all her music, it's clear that her music has become more adventurous through her performances at improvised music festivals (where she infused "Full Moon" with some free jazz skronk) as well as adapting her music to open forest raves at CBD farms ("Yona"). "Lily Pad" was the outcome of this compositional risk-taking. She wanted to do something less predictable, so she attempted a modulation from Gb major to A minor that she never would have normally considered. It sounded totally hilarious to her, and conjured, very specifically, a frog jumping off a lily pad to dive into an underwater realm. Indeed, where many ambient composers lean on field recordings to communicate natural sounds, Sutton establishes the setting entirely through her own compositional prowess.
Album highlights include "Snake," which Sutton said she composed in a wooded backyard full of vines and cats, "with Enya and saxophone and mystery in the back of [her] mind" and "Silhouette," the somber, touching tones communicating dusk marvelously. For "Nighthawk," Sutton plays against the delay pedal to create a shuffle rhythm, like a bird soaring through the night sky. (She discovered later there is a sect of Cherokee traditionalists called the Keetoowah Nighthawk Society–a total coincidence.) Album closer "Sunrise" returns us to the sweeping ambience of opener "Waterfall," and another experimental discovery: that the arpeggiator combined with the delay pedal made for a really lush texture. Wanting to build on that, Sutton added arpeggios on the synth, ensuring enough notes would overlap to give the moment a glistening, dreamy quality evoking the majesty of dawn.
Canyon is an album that demands to be heard in the fullness of life—its beauty, its play, its seriousness, its moments of tension and relief. It finds Sutton elevating her incredible piano skills through the endless possibilities of synthesised sound, wielding an astute sense of the environmental and emotional force of each note and every clearing.
Tracklist01. Waterfall
02. Lily Pad
03. Snake
04. Yona
05. Silhouette
06. Full Moon
07. Nighthawk
08. Sunrise