Gabie Strong’s latest album, 'Wilding Sun,' is a distinct addition to Dragon’s Eye Recordings’ catalog, consisting of four arrangements titled after medicinal herbs. The album relationally places the listener in synesthetic herbal wash, translating flavor and fragrance into sound through live improvisations, home recordings, and field recordings. Each composition is healing in its own rite; all flourish together to create a complex, organic whole.
The first track, “Lavender”, is a recording from her most recent performance celebrating the painting exhibition 'Forest' by artist Pamela Jorden at Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco. Both Strong and Jorden share similar movements when manipulating sound and paint, respectively; they both bend, droop, reach, wave, teeter and stretch to manipulate their materials. Strong's guitar improvisation is an homage to the embodied gestures and luscious pigments which comprise Jorden’s 'Forest.'
“Catnip” and “Dandelion” both blend unique self-recorded improvisations and site-specific field recordings made by Strong in 2021. There is simultaneously a compact, domestic intimacy and an expansive sense of unfurling in each composition.
Finally, “Mugwort” is a lo-fi recording of the artist's charged 2019 performance at “Hell in a Handbag 8: Handbag Factory's 8-Year Anniversary” in Los Angeles. The acoustics alternate between hushed static, salient feedback, and sustained drone.
Much like a garden, Strong’s compositions cultivate a sense of external enclosure—the quality of being both inside and out. The four tracks, like their namesakes, are simultaneously delicate and hearty, remedial and temperamental and graceful; the album itself an apothecary, offering up a holistic transmutation of the senses.
credits
released November 12, 2021
Sounds: live improvised guitar, contact mics on hair and face, synthesizer, crickets, cats and frogs.
Cover Art: Detail of Pamela Jorden's painting 'Dusking,' 2021. Acrylic and oil paint on linen. Photographed by John Pearson. Romer Young Gallery.
Engineering Assistance: Ian Wellman.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space.
Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music, UK.
Thank you all my friends and most especially Pam Jorden, John Pearson, Sameer Farooq, Pauline Lay, Ian Wellman, Trevor Baker, Michael Morley, Sarah Roselena Brady, Johanna Hedva, Vivian Sming, Christopher Reid Martin, Lisa Wahlander, Alice Könitz, Mike Harding, Geneva Skeen, Paul Haney, Jay Erker, John Mills, Greg Curtis, Ben White, TJO + JMY, Elaine Carey, Shelly Burgon, Anna Homler, Handbag Factory, Huell Howler, and Father Yann.
This album is dedicated in loving memory to Mallory Strong, 1941-2021.
yann's approach to stasis and dynamic restraint have been referential points for me in my own artistic path - this release is no exception - and yet it feels a bit more open, wider, somehow carries a little more release and anguish - just superb. wndfrm
William Ryan Fritch's enthralling, doomy new CD comes housed in a gorgeous, panoramic gatefold sleeve with bewitching original artwork. Bandcamp New & Notable May 16, 2016
One of her strongest works ever. This album has deep ambient drone instrumentals, but also some almost krautrock-y moments which I seriously love. 5/5. zensounds