zander raymond: for all we know

'no one notices the fly' is the latest release from Chicago based multi-disciplinary artist, Zander Raymond. Raymond, who has authored or appeared on around a dozen albums (give or take a couple) in the last half-decade, here continues to refine his approach to careful and active listening and music making. On this collection he’s occasionally joined by past collaborators and deep listening comrades Lia Kohl and Matt Sage. Opening with “just keep going”, a brief recording of a reaching and plaintive, out-of-tune violin whose amateurish playing nevertheless delivers a certain depth of feeling. It also possibly acts as a bit of a mission statement; that here we will be shown that we can find meaning from the barest of means. Every song on this record is slightly cracked and seemingly concerned with detritus, each piece a careful and layered accumulation of what in other hands might be solely considered cast-off sounds. The songs could almost be the aural equivalent of the Japanese sculptor Yuji Agematsu’s daily collection of “desirable street debris”, which he constructs in exquisite, miniature arrangements inside the empty cellophane sleeves of old cigarette packages; each piece a new and unique, dazzling landscape, a whole world unto itself. Through Raymond’s improvisational approach, which employs live sampling and imaginative filtering, the most mundane sounds are refracted into a new, if fleeting, reality. The micro becomes macro, the quotidian rendered into the sublime. In these songs we might find certain doors opening, wind breezing through, steam rising, or restless feet becoming grounded. A piece will sound stable, until it’s not. Patterns are set until small insertions and intrusions interrupt, and maybe a new pattern will form. Or maybe not. One of the minor miracles of this album is that it appears, via sound, to render entropy in action. Across its fourteen tracks, we find a thoughtful, modest reminder to take notice of the aleatory nature of our lives, to maybe even “notice the fly”, as it were.