Zach Seely: Both of your album titles are inspired by literature. “The Blue Distance” comes from Rebecca Solnit, and “Drifts and Surfaces” draws inspiration from Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts. Can you share what your reading life is like and how it intersects, if at all, with your compositions and creative process?
Elori Saxl: Reading is a big part of my life. It’s one of the most dependable ways I know to calm my mind and bring it into a more patient and positive space. It is also a very essential part of my composition process. I generally begin musical projects with long research periods where I'm exploring a certain theme and developing questions I want to try to explore through music. I’m quite happy reading forever and sometimes think I might just be procrastinating from actually making music, so sometimes I have to make myself stop and force myself to actually touch an instrument. The title thing is funny–I almost feel embarrassed by the amount of references I'm racking up, but writers are much better than I am at coming up with concise ways of describing large ideas with words, so I keep wanting to use their words.
In Drifts, Zambreno's character is obsessed with the works of Chantal Akerman, among other aesthetic interests. You are also a filmmaker, so I’m curious about your relationship with that art form and perhaps Akerman in particular.
For me, sounds and visuals are all mixed up and intertwined, so in a way they’re just different ways of exploring the same ideas and feelings. These days I’m pretty focused on just making music and pretty happy to hand over film directing duties to other people, but I watch a ton of films and definitely think pretty incessantly about the ways music and images can interact. I just felt at some point like I didn’t have the bandwidth to both pursue directing projects and make music, and I'm fully addicted to making music.
I wasn’t aware of Ackerman’s work until I read Drifts, so I can’t say her work has directly influenced any of my past filmmaking. But there are definitely some throughlines between Zambreno’s Drifts, some of Ackerman’s work like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and my piece Drifts: an interest in foregrounding the mundane/minutiae/everyday as subject with inherent value in itself, and a shared interest in capturing the present tense. The idea of quiet and domestic activity having intrinsic value and being the thing itself.
Your new album has been influenced by your experience on Madeline Island. There’s a quote from Jamaica Kincaid’s reflections on growing up on an island, describing how time is experienced differently: “Antigua is a small place. Antigua is a very small place. In Antigua, not only is the event turned into everyday, but the everyday is turned into an event.” Does this quote resonate with you, and did those everyday events make their way into your compositions? More simply, what does living on an island mean to you?
Wow, I hadn’t heard that before, but yes it very much does resonate. Life on an island is inherently isolated, and one effect of that isolation (especially in a very small community), is that small things can start to feel really big. It’s pretty easy to lose perspective, which can be a good thing in some ways as I think it does lead to some really original ways of thinking and doing things, but it can also be dangerous when you forget to compare things to the rest of the world. A conversation gone a little awry can start to echo around your brain and feel like the biggest problem in the world, when it’s really practically nothing. On the other hand, the isolation leads to so many unusual and somewhat unintentionally utopic ways of doing things: people share resources out of necessity, find ways of being in community with people they disagree with, and are constantly coming up with ingenious ways of getting things done and fixing things with what they have at hand. I suppose those are all things that have definitely seeped into my music–I am much more interested in creative and economical ways of arranging whatever sounds I have than I am in virtuosity. There’s also (at least on this particular wisconsin island) a very low key and humble energy around doing things that might be considered challenging or exceptional to others: living in -15 degree weather, kids taking the ferry or windled to school everyday, building lots of stuff from scratch and knowing how to get food from the woods. There’s definitely an energy of: you just do it and don’t need to make a big deal of it, and that has definitely informed how I like to move through the world.
How much is the work about your memory of your time on the island? "The Blue Distance" had a memory built into the structure of the album as you tried to capture the green (or blue) of the Adirondack mountains while ensconced on the island. How has your relationship to that time (The Blue Distance era) changed if at all in this more recent work?
The Blue of Distance was about memory of a place and time, and Drifts and Surfaces was about trying to capture the present tense.
I’m very curious about your experience with transportation on the island, especially during the winter months. Did any of the unique modes of transportation—windsled, car, ski—make their way into your music?
Most of the year, you take a ferry to the island. Most winters, eventually the ice freezes thick enough that you can drive across and an ice road is made. But there’s a period in between these two times where the ice is not safe to drive across yet but too thick for the ferry to break through that you take the windsled, which is basically a boat with skis on the bottom and a giant propeller fan on the back. So you glide across the ice, but if you break through you are in a boat and will float.
The world of winter transportation on the island is amazing. When the ice freezes between islands, an entire world opens up where you can ski, snowmobile, and even drive depending on the year between islands, and suddenly the space available to explore grows by about 20 times. The sound world in this time is also incredible. There are deep booms, cracks, and pulses that almost sound like techno being played in the distance that come up from the ice. There is also constant noise: the windsled fan groaning, snow plows scraping over ice, and skis gliding across snow. And then as the ice starts to break apart, there’s a whole spectrum of constantly changing sounds of different shapes of ice moving against each other. In The Blue of Distance, I used actual recordings of water under ice. In Drifts and Surfaces, it was more abstract impressions. But I think the noisier components definitely made their way in.
The album feels cold and frost-encrusted, yet it doesn’t evoke a sense of darkness or bleakness that are common tropes of Winter. What is your relationship with Winter?
Well to address the first part of the question, I think regardless of what I may experience internally, I am only interested in putting work into the world that has at least a shard of hope in it. So with these pieces, even when it was feeling like there was a lot of darkness, I tried to make sure there were always cracks where light could come through. And I suppose that is also how I live. It’s more a choice than an intrinsic belief, but I choose to believe there are always cracks where light can come through and to put my attention there.
Regarding winter, I love it. I think I might have reverse seasonal depression. I grew up playing ice hockey and basically doing all winter sports at some point and still love them all. My favorite feeling is being outside on a cold and sunny day.
This might be a bit personal, but I’m curious about your daily life on the island. What did you cook, what did you listen to, and how did you spend your time? Did that daily life translate into work?
I cooked all kinds of things, and since the nearest city was a few hours away, I got pretty good at making whatever I was missing. There’s amazing fish from the lake, so lots of fresh and smoked trout, whitefish, and fried smelt when it’s in season. The weirdest thing I made was general tso’s chicken but using dandelion flower heads instead of chicken. Honestly tasted the same. I mostly listened to pop. I made music, read, ran, xc skied, sauna’d, had bonfires, foraged, made stuff, built trails, hung out with people, watched movies, did film editing and scoring jobs for money.
I also felt pretty creatively confused and exploratory during this time, and there were a lot of periods of aimlessness, procrastination, starting and stopping, and endless experimentation. Kate Zambreno’s Drifts was inspiring to me because it felt like she was asking whether all of that could be the subject of instead of the precursor to a body of work. Living next to Lake Superior and spending countless hours looking at the water, it occurred to me that there was a parallel between these aimless waves of ideas and work with the lake’s water droplets coalescing into waves that constantly changed direction. It felt like an embodiment of the present tense.
While the three pieces for the album were commissions more closely associated with the art world and experimental music communities, you’ve also done some commercial work, particularly compositions for high-profile outdoor brands. How does your work and process translate between these different spaces, and what doesn't?
With my own work, I’m often spending long periods experimenting with different sound processes to create a language, and the finished work is like a live capturing of my curiosity and resonance with certain sounds. It’s generally very personal and emotional for me. With scoring jobs, since directors are usually referencing my past work, I’m often employing the same sound language I've previously created, but because the language is already created, it’s less emotionally loaded and is very easy and fast to put together. Much more plug and play. On the other hand, because commercial work usually needs to happen fast and with lots of iterations, I’m often churning out ideas without much analytic thought, and sometimes those ideas are actually much better than what I make when I'm thinking too much. And also in my own work I tend to be very subtle whereas commercial work generally has much bigger strokes, and even though I tend to be a bit sensitive to those bigger strokes feeling a little cheesy or overly dramatic, it seems like most people actually respond much more to those bigger motions.
What’s your relationship with skiing?
Well, I had a weird brief period at the end of high school when I got pretty deep into freestyle snowboarding to the point where I was traveling around the country and competing in various events. When I went to college, I felt like I was investing too much energy and money in developing my brain to justify hucking myself off large things anymore, so I joined ski patrol and did that for all four years of school. I did it on a snowboard at first and then got a free pair of tele skis and would use those. Both incredibly impractical. Now I still go occasionally, but in most places it’s gotten so expensive and the culture around it feels really different from what I grew up with that it’s a lot less appealing, and i mostly just xc ski in the woods now. I grew up snowboarding at Hyland Hills in Minneapolis, and the culture around skiing there felt very urban and diy in a cool way. People would wear jeans, basketball jerseys, tall tees, and leather jackets. Or make their own ski clothes. The tow rope was patrolled by city cops. It was 300 vertical feet and often below zero. People would get like 50 laps in an hour and hit the same messed up rail with an iced out landing and be thrilled about it. Now so many places just feel like wealthy people with brand new ski outfits and snowmakers emitting this constant ominous moaning sound and man-made snow surrounded by dirt because it’s getting so warm in the winter, and it all just makes me feel like maybe I shouldn't be doing this. So now I mostly xc ski, which I've become pretty obsessed with. I love that it’s really accessible and also a way of exploring the woods. You stay warm, it’s good exercise, and you can do it when you’re old.
Although your music can be categorized as ambient, typically a solo endeavor, your recent album is collaborative and inspired by chamber-music ensembles. Can you talk about your collaborators?
Drifts was written for two percussion ensembles, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago) and Tigue (NYC). I feel very sure that I never would have come up with the music I ended up writing had I not been working with them. In terms of instruments, what I was able to write based on their specific (and incredible) skill sets, and ways the pieces were shaped by feedback the ensembles gave me. There was so much conversation involved in writing those pieces. Both were workshopped for over a year, and the final versions were shaped by questions, ideas, and feedback the ensembles shared with me. And that took many forms from things as specific as going through an entire room of percussion instruments with me and trying different processing techniques with recordings of each of them, telling me certain things weren’t possible to play or ways the notation could make more sense, to more abstract things like introducing me to other pieces, composers, or ideas I wasn’t familiar with.
In a lot of my current work, collaboration looks like me choosing specific people I want to perform with and then trying to write music that will allow them to fully slay. Creating the ideal environments for their skills and voices to shine. I tend to get pretty squirmy and creatively blocked when I start feeling like this project is all about me, me me, but if I can think of it more in these terms of trying to build ecosystems for friends to shine in, the ideas flow pretty endlessly. Even if the final results are still basically the same, it’s a very helpful brainhack for me to get out of my own way. I just played a show at Public Records in NYC with Henry Solomon on bass clarinet, Zosha Warpeha on hardanger fiddle, and Jonathan Kaiser on cello that was maybe my favorite concert I’ve ever played. I love all of their voices and what they bring to my music so much. We built little moments into the set where they each took a solo that was more in their own voice outside of my music, and I think people were pretty blown away by all of them. It was so special for me to get to listen and watch that happen.
I’m also trying to bring more improvisation into the music, which is totally new for me. I used to think that I made good things by carefully and meticulously crafting bit by bit in a room by myself. But this past year, I’ve had a few experiences where I fully improvise from scratch with another person, and it’s resulted in some of the best music I think I’ve ever made. So now I feel like I know absolutely nothing about where good ideas come from. I feel like I’ve been cracked open in the best way.