It’s been a busy season for the former members of the much-loved but short-lived Calgary indie-rock act Women. The band’s singer, Patrick Flegel, recently stepped out with their avant-pop drag queen alter ego, Cindy Lee. In March, their bassist brother, Matt, and drummer Mike Wallace released an album with their intense post-punk outfit Preoccupations. The final member of Women, guitarist Chris Reimer, went to bed one night in February 2012 and never woke up—but he, too, has a new record out this spring.
There were many shocking facets to Reimer’s death from heart complications at 26: its suddenness; his young, prime-of-life age; the fact that it came just as he was forging a path forward after Women’s infamous onstage break-up by joining indie-folk stompers the Dodos. Reimer’s sister Nikki coped by making the mourning process communal, launching a memorial blog that quickly transformed into a digital storehouse of photos, live performances, and articles about Reimer. That outpouring coincided with the establishment of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society, a group of family and friends that has created a digital catalog of his multidisciplinary work, commissioned animated short-film tributes to Reimer, and donated money in his name to support young people studying music and dance.
Now, the group that has been instrumental in preserving his legacy is helping to unveil a new dimension of it, with Hello People. For the better part of a decade, Reimer had been stockpiling ambient compositions that he never got around to releasing. Some of these appeared on a limited-edition 2012 cassette fundraiser for the Legacy Fund, titled The Chad Tape and recorded with musician and producer Chad VanGaalen shortly before Reimer’s passing. But Hello People offers a more thorough representation of the breadth of these private recordings, spreading 15 very different pieces over 65 minutes and four sides of vinyl. Delicate and playful at times, dark and foreboding at others, the collection forms a collaged portrait of an artist who was always seeking new pathways to access the most elemental emotions, from joy to dread.
Some of these recordings may have been rough sketches that Reimer intended to elaborate on later. “Hongdi,” one of the few tracks that features drums, is a desolate, windswept apparition of Slintian post-rock that dissolves just as it seems to be coalescing, while the brief snippet “Mustard Gas” could be a Women song stripped down to nothing but Reimer’s tense electric-guitar curlicues. Even this collection’s lone traditionally structured song, “About,” emphasizes a sense of absence: Over a percolating guitar refrain, Reimer lays down an acoustic melody and a whispered vocal that’s barely audible above the strums. On its own terms, the song is a poignant foray into Elliott Smith-style melancholia; in light of Reimer’s passing, it’s devastating to hear his voice fade into the ether.
More than simply showcasing Reimer’s unreleased experiments, Hello People puts us right there beside him. This is a record where tape hiss, ambient room sounds, muffled background dialogue, and fidgeting equipment play as big a role as any proper instrument. But on the album’s trio of captivating extended pieces, Reimer explores variations on a theme until all sense of time and place is lost: The mesmerizing fog of “Beneluxx” conjures the same weightless, uneasy sensation as Boards of Canada’s early ambient pieces; by contrast, “Wallpaper 6 (extenze edit)” is a warm, churchly organ drone that feels like the build-up to a Spiritualized epic. In a perfect world, some hip entrepreneur would license the analog-synth starbursts of the hypnotic “Arpeg” and program them into a sound machine to soothe crying babies.
It isn’t just the recordings that sprawl beyond the 10-minute mark that strike a deep emotional chord. The brief track “French Death” opens Hello People with the pluck of an acoustic-guitar string, suggesting that some stripped-down, folky instrumental will follow. But Reimer immediately pulls back the dusty curtain to reveal a gorgeous 3D soundscape, its eye-socket-swelling synth texture bleeding like a red sky at sunset. It may be impossible to distill a life into 66 seconds of sound, but this succinct track embodies Reimer’s defining qualities: It’s welcoming, industrious, full of surprises, and gone far too soon.
