The Macro-Cymatic Visual Music Instrument is a synesthete’s dream. Built by Marielle V. Jakobsons, the device translates musical vibrations into moving images using LEDs and a shallow trough of water; as sound waves stir the illuminated liquid, a video camera picks up the play of motion and texture. The invisible is made thrillingly visible as the faintest vibrations are transformed into richly dynamic fields of fluid movement, a constant flux of shadows and highlights that would surely make 4AD designer Vaughan Oliver swoon. And while they may recall the liquid projections of the 1960s, these visuals are more than just psychedelic window dressing; by turning vibrations into visual representations, they offer hints as to the inner mechanics of sound. They return music to the physical world, to the level of math and measurement, without losing sight of abstraction, emotion, or mysticism.
That idea of stripping things to their essence goes to the heart of Star Core, the Bay Area musician’s second solo album under her own name. (She used the Macro-Cymatic to create a video for the album track “White Sparks.”) Made principally with synthesizer, violin, flute, fretless electric bass, and voice, it is an album where the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture, where microtones signify at the same level as melodies. But this isn’t minimalism, really; it uses those minutiae as building blocks for a much broader musical vision, one tugged between meditative stasis and quietly ecstatic reveries.
Much of Jakobsons’ work, both solo and in the duo Date Palms and other groups, has deftly balanced drones with rootsier strands of American music. Her new album continues in that direction, folding together Eastern ragas with hints of Henry Flynt’s hillbilly minimalism along with fleeting traces of blues and even doom metal. It might be the most melodic thing she’s done; she even sings here. On the opening “White Sparks,” chanted vocals invoking the sun and the moon lend to the music’s ritual feel; elsewhere, her voice adds wordless breath to shimmering harmonic fields, reinforcing the human scale of her vast desert vistas.
She favors fifths and sevenths and seconds, intervals that lend themselves to powerful sensations of tension and release. Jakobsons’ melodies, like the sweeping violins of “Star Core” and “Rising Light” and the flutes of “The Beginning Is the End,” are at once deeply intuitive and faintly exotic, fusing a distant, hard-to-place longing with déjà vu. (Perhaps that déjà vu has to do with the fact that her string melodies at times sound uncannily like those of Echo and the Bunnymen; on “Star Core,” it’s as though she has stripped away the British band’s rock trappings to reveal the molten ambient core that was lurking in their music all along.) Her pulsing layers of synthesizer often recall Emeralds in full bliss-out mode, and in places, her vision of rock-based ambient music even brings to mind Hugo Largo, a woefully underrated New York band that was affiliated with Brian Eno’s Opal label in the late ’80s.
Unlike drone music that draws its power from duration, stretching out to 10 or 12 or 20 minutes, Jakobsons takes a more efficient approach to trance states: These songs average around five minutes long, and the music is stronger and more potent for it. She is interested in drone less as a fait accompli than as a kind of moving target. Never static, her songs are always evolving, albeit often imperceptibly, and their outward simplicity hides their deep structural complexity. But all that heavy lifting is on Jakobsons; we listeners get to simply lie back and dissolve into the music, savoring its uniquely nuanced mood, which lands halfway between melancholy and hope. It’s an exquisite balancing act, and one that—particularly now, and particularly in America—feels like as true a musical statement as you could ask for.
