Pitchfork

When I was a teenager, my friend and I recorded music while standing in a cedar pond, water up to our shoulders, guitars over our heads. And one time we wrapped blankets around our heads, played as loudly as possible on his porch, and commenced battle with the invisible army of neighboring bugs. Our guitars blended into and supplemented their chirps. There was a night we snuck to a barely paved fire road and rubbed carrots back and forth in the dirt; and though I'm vegan, I once mic'd a pork chop and later used the otherworldly scrapes of the meat as a minor-key percussion track. These exercises were each an attempt to locate previously undisclosed sounds, to move beyond standard instrumentation. It was through these sorts of things that I learned how to tilt an acoustic guitar against a hand-held recorder for feedback, and realized that twisting my body a bit to the left made the same strings a muted whisper.

On their third album, We Walked the Young Earth, San Francisco-based Jewelled Antler stalwarts Glenn Donaldson and Loren Chasse, obvious disciples of the above tenets, construct an aural topography using complexly geographic-based recording techniques. Recorded last summer in a World War II-era bunker in the Marin Headlands and under a creek bridge in San Gregario, We Walked the Young Earth picks up where 2001's achingly ephemeral Waves of Grass left off. Here, however, the duo forges the din of acoustic guitar, harp, bells, harmonium, toy amplifiers, gongs (submerged in a creek), battery-powered keyboards, vocals, banjo, birds, pipes, bell-blocks, drums, and branches into even quieter spaces of beauty. The best comparisons might be Flying Saucer Attack and Richard Youngs collaborating on an unplugged psych meditation, a tree-bound Calvino-inspired Ghost with even more droning patience, a restive California-style International Harvester, Sun City Girls when they drone the Eastern thing, or a stretched-out This Kind of Punishment minus the rusted baritone.

On "The Book of Names", Donaldson's wistful vocalizations seem like invocations to various forestland gods. "The Oldest Living Things" is built within bubbling water and a cricket solo. Throughout the album, wind chimes are raised to the level of art, distant whispering seems like an animal call, and wind ominously sounds like anything but wind. "All Children's Faces Looking Upwards" is guitar-based psych with the rusted crumble of a gong scraping the background. Interestingly, on the album as a whole, percussion seems like a series of tasks and rarely functions as a backbeat.

"Green Patterns" is more claustrophobic than the others: Notes on a guitar are tapped and chiseled, a load of percussion drips and clatters, and analog feedback hums; a shift brings the percussion more to the fore, and evokes a ghost dragging its chains through the dead leaves of the forest floor. Tones resonate, and are drawn out endlessly. And the final bit, the title track, is reminiscent of ECIM-era Cul-De-Sac: a last-gasp falsetto, strings are plucked, bells are shaken towards a nighttime sky, an underlying sadness remains. I imagine The Blithe Sons leaving their instruments in place for a year and returning each season to see what's written upon them. How would these pieces sound with so much more history and decay, the freeform structures and striations of passing sediment?

The sense of place on We Walk the Young Earth is affecting, the care taken in capturing naturally occurring sounds admirable. Some bits aren't as strong as others (the drones do sometimes drone), but the constant reciprocity between the players and their instinctive interaction with the environment is damn-near breathtaking. If you listen carefully enough to these recordings, which were set to the rhythm of a particular environment, their expansive sounds in turn consume the patterns of your space, creating an endlessly dense hymn that leaks and breathes into the city around you.