On paper, the latest album by electro-acoustic composer and installation artist Yvette Janine Jackson isn’t the most inviting of propositions for these miserable days. It features two lengthy soundscapes: the 23-minute Destination Freedom is a sonic representation of a slave ship crossing the Atlantic; the 20-minute Invisible People is an aural collage that confronts homophobia within African American communities.
Yet both pieces are subtle and compelling. The first is an immersive aural soundtrack that conjures up images more vivid than anything a motion picture could provide: a harrowing babble of ocean sounds, heartbeats, distorted screams, Bernard Herrmann strings and slow-motion explosions, which seems to obey an almost symphonic structure. The second is described by Jackson as a “radio opera” and it’s quite similar to one of those Archive on 4 documentaries on BBC Radio 4: a restless, cut-and-clip montage of (frequently shocking) quotes from street preachers, politicians, TV evangelists and excerpts from essays by homophobic Afrocentric academics (including Frances Cress Welsing). Despite the subject matter, it is a witty piece, punctuated by a musical backing that lurches from minimalist chamber jazz arrangements to gospel pastiches and free-jazz freakouts.
There is a shared resonance between the two pieces: certain sonically horrifying motifs appear in both, and something surprising and new emerges with each listen. Any smart Hollywood producer would immediately snap up Jackson to provide film soundtracks, but her work requires no visual explanation.
Also out this month
AER (Fuga Libera) is an album by Peltomaa Fraanje Perkola, an unorthodox Dutch/Finnish trio for voice, piano and viola da gamba, which takes medieval hymns and transforms them into quizzical, drone-based experimental miniatures. In a jazzier vein is Aries Point (22 January, Outnote), where Renaissance music specialists the Hathor Consort play austere, sometimes atonal arrangements alongside trumpeter Bastian Stein, as if Don Cherry sat in with an Elizabethan string ensemble. A distinctly American variation of this retro-minimalism is Narrow Sea (22 January, Nonesuch), by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, which takes folksy, 19th-century Sacred Harp hymns and places them in a disorientating environment.
• This article was corrected on 15 January 2021: Yvette Janine Jackson’s album is released on Fridman Gallery, not Phantom Limb Music as previously stated.
