The Patterns Lost To Air

Description

Marielle V Jakobsons has developed a singular voice, shaped by minimalist, ambient, and spiritual traditions. Her recordings, from her early work with Date Palms to her current collaboration with Chuck Johnson in Saariselka, and most notably with The Patterns Lost to Air, reveal a Jakobsons of exceptional sonic virtuosity, a musician who understands patience and mastery. Able to make the most of the sonic elements she chooses, the album is structured around three main voices: the violin, the Fender Rhodes, and the Moog Matriarch. It was recorded in 2024 in the studio she built in Oakland, California, whose large bay windows overlook a garden planted with olive and palm trees, where sparrows and hummingbirds nest. The album "The Patterns Lost to Air" was also born from a personal transformation in Jakobsons, triggered by the aftereffects of long Covid, as well as a deliberate musical shift, moving from drones to working with scores and written music. She thus drew on her classical training and harmonic writing. More than a simple evolution, it was an urgent need to redefine herself, to the very core of her being, because she could no longer create music in the same way. This need became the guiding thread of "The Patterns Lost to Air". What happens when we let go of familiar patterns—sonic, internal, memorial—and let them transform around us? How do we navigate this transformation to reinvent and renew ourselves? On "The Patterns Lost to Air", each piece emerges from a necessary constraint, revealing how limitation itself can become a portal to new sonic and semantic territories. Jakobsons emphasizes: "This cycle of renewal, loss, and transformation transcends, in my view, the narrative of illness." The pieces use slowly evolving loops and patterns, which fade gracefully over time, gradually settling from one movement to the next. Through soundscapes of Fender Rhodes piano, synthesizers, and strings, the album explores the space between these patterns, like threads of memory, each note transfiguring and dissolving. The album celebrates dissipation, the wisps of melody physically transforming the air as sound inexorably returns to silence. Jakobsons composes by imagining the shapes sound takes as it projects into the listening space, and how it becomes "lost to air" as it metamorphoses and fades. This physicality of sound is a recurring theme in her work, but this album offers a more direct exploration of the interactions between sound, air, and physical space. The spectral compositions of The Patterns Lost to Air are like sonic pools, brimming with life and mystery. The delicacy of the sounds and the complexity of the harmonies create a broad and shimmering expression. From the synthesizer ostinato and lush strings of the optimistic "Everything Lost Remains" to the dappled Rhodes patterns and enveloping violins of "Insistence" and "Without You Inside Time", Jakobsons' music perceives the relief of release and embraces new horizons. "The Patterns Lost to Air" is music that invites dreaming, a work of shimmering and delicate beauty.