There is a sense of mystery that runs throughout Voids, the second release by Old Fire. The group basically consists of Texan John Mark Lapham and a wealth of collaborators, including singers Bill Callahan, Adam Torres, Emily Cross and Julia Holter. Creating lush soundscapes that focus less on melody and more atmospherics, the assembled multitudes beguile and sometimes befuddle listeners by never going for easy musical answers.
Consider the list of artists that have influenced this music. This man from Abilene found himself listening to Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil during his formative years. Not exactly what was on the hit parade in West Texas. Studying sound production in Manchester, England, he formed the band The Earlies with Giles Hatton. Combining Lapham’s work with Hatton, who was influenced by The Beach Boys, Sparklehorse and Van Dyke Parks, you have a recipe that wasn’t in the mainstream.
The album comes out of a series of trying events. “I was feeling the brunt of a relationship ending, and the emptiness it left behind. “Over the course of compiling the album, I lost both my parents, and the pandemic started. These recordings were born out of that loss, and that isolation. The title Voids was a natural fit.” Filling those voids, Lapham carefully creates sounds that go to the depths and despair he was experiencing.
Bill Callahan transforms “Don’t You Go,” John Martyn’s anti-war diatribe. Starting with nothing more than guitar and Callahan’s voice and played at a funereal pace, it gets to the heart of what Martyn was proposing to his son in the most incredible fashion. Thomas Bartlett’s piano track is nothing short of haunting, and when Lapham layers in synth parts the song creates an undeniable sense of not only the devastation that war can cause on the battlefield but even more the totally transformative effect that it has on the people at home.
Lapham’s work often builds towards the vocals, yet Julia Holter’s guest appearance breaks all the rules he seems to establish. Leading with a vocal sample of Holter along with synth samples, Christian Madden starts running the track through a vocoder, altering the tones and timbres of Holter’s voice. Guitars, harp, xylophone and saxophone get added to the proceedings, building an edgy, cerebral mix.
The four sections of “Voids” that end the collection illustrate both a compassion and understanding that were hard to come by before the pandemic gave us time to look back on life. “Void III: Father as Child” came together after Lapham found a note his late father had written to his own father. The child pleaded with dad not to cut down his favorite tree. “His voice was so sweet, naive and innocent, a side of my dad I had never seen prior to that. It reminded me how he was so much more than his role of father, that he had lived different lives before that, and how all of us are more than the box we put each other in.”
The final section, “Void IV: Circles,” provides a sense of release from some of the tension that has been built up over the course of 11 tracks. The addition of woodwinds along with synths breaks through much of what went before, yet the final moments, which focus on just drums, undercuts things slightly.
Light yet dense, moody and melancholic, this music plays on you in ways that burrow into your senses. It’s not an easy listening experience, challenging you to go beyond simple sounds and find the neural pathways that trigger responses. Over time you are pulled into the maelstrom of sound and forced to re-evaluate what you know and how you listen to music. Old Fire enters Voids and serves as a thesis in how one deals with a world that doesn’t really make sense.
