#29 Feat. Staff Picks in Electronica

Things take the time they take, wrote poet Mary Oliver, revealing so much about life with only a few simple words. When we think about art, we often focus on results: a song, a theatre piece, a painting... but if we listen to the artists, they mostly talk about the process that led to those results. Like the baker with baking, or the gardener with gardening, the bread and flowers take time to come through. Focusing on practice seems radical in a world obsessed with outcomes, mainly because results can be consumed and owned. A musician searching to encounter sound, rather than chasing the songs, strives, as Duchamp said, to make visible the invisible, or in this case, to turn silence into music, and thats how Sketches 1-17 came to be. In winter 2021, artist Christopher Colm Morrin, stuck at home alone for the holidays, coped by focusing entirely on creating sound, using a guitar and a few pedals, storing the recordings in a folder called sketches. The music flowed raw and sincere, like a river with high and low tidessometimes barely there, other times overflowing. A sketch is a witness to stillness and attention, a rupturing beam of light through the storm of distraction. Sketches 1-17, with its colourful and sincere lines and its earnest delivery, draw, with devotion, a chant to time and place, to the here and the now, and to allow things to take the time they take. Sketches 1-17 is released by the Berlin-based label Stray Signals.

Christopher Colm Morrin