Savath and Savalas
Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey
[Hefty]
Rating: 7.0
Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die was so troublingly serene in execution that
I was undone the first time I heard it. The music on that disc seemed to alternate capriciously
between the sound of conspiracy and the sound of accident. In certain moments, Millions Now
Living actually sounded millions of years in the making: the layers had happened upon each
other in an accidental intimacy in the manner of continents. So when Tortoise's TNT
failed to produce this uncanny preordained sense of absolute rightness, people turned on it
somewhat, overlooking its facile loveliness.
Savath and Savalas' hokey- titled Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey is electronic
Chicago post-rock in the vein of TNT. It's easy ambient, not quite as terrestrially
expansive as, say, Global Communications' 76:14, or astronomically warped as the Orb's
Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. The music is truly beautiful; the groove is faithful
and the effects enchant without alienating. The whole project has a massage- chair energy,
purring constantly under the backside of the mind. What you get with the vibrating massage
chair is consistency; what you sacrifice is the awkward and often vague sexuality of a human
massage. There's no jeopardy in Folk Songs: you don't risk losing your mind, but you
don't chance falling in love.
Socrates points it out in Plato's "Symposium": love is temporal. What we love passionately today
we love all the more passionately because there's always the possibility that the object of our
affections will not be there tomorrow. But the pleasant grooving sway of Folk Songs for
Trains, Trees and Honey will always be there, right where you left it when your mind and
ears wandered off. This is not to disparage the subtlety of Savath and Savalas' craft, because
the pleasantry is textured and self- effacing by design. But it fails to terrify. You never get
the sense that you must listen to a particular moment because the entire record exists on the
verge of being undone. Just the opposite, actually-- this is ambient true to Brian Eno's
intentions: sonic wallpaper, perfected in disappearance. Like a stick of incense, Savath and
Savalas' music will continue to perfume the environment long after you have ceased to pay
attention to the source.
Unfortunately, Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey just barely breaks the thirty-
minute mark. Great ambient needs time to erase itself, to nuzzle itself in the quiet of an
ordinary room, unobtrusive as passing traffic and street- level exchanges, or footfall overhead.
But the album is nevertheless a fine if somewhat innocuous debut, and it'll sketch and slip
about the sonic periphery with almost feline equipoise. No more bad dreams. It's easy like
Sunday morning.
-Brent S. Sirota