Snowblink - Returning Current (2016)

Snowblink’s newest collection of songs is an unflinching study of human relationships – to self, to other, and to Other, and to the threat or actuality of losing those unrepeatable prizes. At the outset of the recording process, Gesundheit made a text version of a “mood board” to portray the sensations she wished to evoke in the production of the album.
The musicians, producers, and engineers were faced with the task of sonically approximating:

santa fe / arizona / palm springs /sunset over a mesa /either sunburst and pastel or loud crashing flash floods and lightning /calypso disco / lots of space with bursts or ripples of sound /sauna

Practically, this ambition meant that the band approached each song by any means necessary– here a full band live off the floor in a winter cabin, here a painstaking half­-year-­long process of revision, here a drum sample from years ago mixed with dozens of layers of analog synths and vocals. In sculpting the singular sound of Returning Current, no process was out of bounds – the band made themselves equally at home with a bevy of acoustic instruments, analog processes, or sample­ based in­ the ­box production choices. By any means necessary.

What results is “mastery at its liquidiest” (Feist in a personal letter to the band), a collection of songs that find the speaker reporting, in the stark, James Blake­esque ballad Second Sight, that “the sky was kneeling on my back to pray,” or elucidating the slipperiness of desire, as in Returning Current:

Like a monk or a mystic quiet on the outside northern lights colluding on the inside The air around me humid as Hawaii with my evaporated desire

These are private songs, domestic songs, songs to be absorbed over time – unhurried, biological time, the passage of which helps us to survive ourselves.