With her 2021 debut, The Blue of Distance, Elori Saxl introduced herself as something like the Steve Reich of seasonal affective disorder. The experimental electronic composer wrote half that album during a joyous Adirondack summer; then, during a bleak Wisconsin winter, she wrote the second half, seeking to recapture the warmth she previously felt but experiencing only longing instead. Eventually, Saxl says, she “made friends with the longing.” And while that process may sound as much like an academic experiment as a compositional method, you needn’t have any knowledge of Saxl’s conceptual framework to appreciate her strangely beautiful music, woodwinds and synthesizer and nature samples all arranged in bucolic bliss. To my ears, it sounded like the arrival of an uncommonly inventive composer, one operating in some mysterious place where ambient and modern minimalism meet.
Saxl used The Blue of Distance to document, in her words, “attempts to access the feeling of being in a place and time that you are not in currently”—but on her latest album, Seeing Is Forgetting, she exists purely in the moment. It’s a collaboration between Saxl and the saxophonist and composer Henry Solomon. Though he’s performed with mainstream pop names like Miley Cyrus and Haim, Solomon is rooted in the L.A. jazz scene, and at ease with the roiling chaos of live improvisation. Saxl, by contrast, is accustomed to a more methodological style, plotting out every note ahead of time. Here, using analog synths while Solomon flits between baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, she shakes off the conceptual rigors of her previous work in favor of a looser, jazzier approach, and the results are airily sublime.
The album opens with the slow drift of “Reverence,” Saxl’s bleary-eyed synth pads providing a simmering base for Solomon’s mournful sax laments. Not until the final moments of the six-minute piece does Solomon reach into the higher registers of his instrument, but when he does, you can feel ambient and spiritual jazz locking into a new kind of communion. “Reno Silver” subverts this soloist vs. accompanist dichotomy as Solomon lays down looped sax textures before Saxl plinks out the song’s ascending melody on a Juno-106. Elsewhere, on the dense, glacial mood pieces “Heart” and “Seeing Is Forgetting,” Solomon uses a bass clarinet as his vehicle of melodic transcendence. One of the exciting things about this record, though, is that you can’t always tell where the synths end and the woodwinds begin.
The duo recorded this music over the course of a few nights in Los Angeles, without writing songs beforehand. For Saxl, it was a revolutionary approach; in the album’s liner notes, she says the process changed her “sense of where ideas come from, where music comes from.” That sense of improvisational rapture is palpable in Solomon’s soloing on looser tracks like “A Thousand Steps” and “Hiding Place.” The album’s best song, “Symmetries,” unlocks a mesmerizing counterpoint between celestial clouds of synth and Solomon’s deep, exploratory sax refrains. It carries a sense of melodic structure and inevitability that doesn’t always arise from improvisational passages.
Seeing Is Forgetting takes its title from a 1982 book by the writer Lawrence Weschler, itself named after a quote from the French poet Paul Valéry. (The Blue of Distance was named after a literary source, too.) For Saxl, the phrase tapped into a “sheer sense of physicality and presence,” a creation process unburdened by past and future obligations. The music thrives on that sense of ephemeral chemistry, but for a listener, its transportive effect lingers long after the album has finished playing.
