Nowadays, a bow usually comes with an arrow in hand and a film camera behind it, though history shows us they've been used as musical instruments ever since 13,000 BCE, a good deal before Katniss ever picked one up. The concept is pretty simple, just string a cord through a bent stick. Then run it over stuff: other strings, other wood, your hands, etc. That’s it. To this day, they’re still frequently used in Africa, including Swaziland—the once-homeland of Cara Stacey.
To call Stacey well-versed as a musician is an understatement. The South African multi-instrumentalist, composer, and researcher received two master's degrees in musicology and musical performance from various universities in London and Edinburgh—and she's still working on a doctorate. With all that knowledge under her belt, Stacey gives South African music a dizzying, beautiful spin, wielding both an uhadi bow and an umrhubhe bow on eight-song voyage Things That Grow. The difference between the two is their resonators, the section of the bow which broadcasts their otherwise quiet sound. The uhadi is a long bow where the player attaches a gourd to the bow, moving it towards and away from their chest to let out pitch-varying overtones. The umrhubhe is a short bow where the player places their mouth on the bow, manipulating their tongue and throat muscles to highlight harmonics coming off the string. The sound hums with an unusually comforting tone, like a saw being sharpened or the coarse bellow of a violin in need of rosin.
Despite its rootsy instrumentation, the album is a raw collision of experimental classical with jazz. Because Cara Stacey didn't grow up in the rural Eastern Cape, nor was she set in the traditional ways of one of South Africa's most traditional instruments, she’s able to explore the bows’ sounds. Opener “Oscillations” hears her scratch the string repeatedly, building up a wall of buzz until the gentle padding of drums come into focus and, almost immediately after, the carefree whistle of someone strolling through the woods. “Durée” places the notes of her bow at the forefront again, even while upright bass begins to grow, so that its resonator captures her every move. There’s the occasional harsh scratch—think a single pinkie nail on a chalkboard—on a few songs, but otherwise the bows act like a never-ending scroll for the other instruments to hammer out a Morse Code message of complex meditation. Joined by Shabaka Hutchings (clarinet, tenor saxophone), Seb Rochford (drums), Ruth Goller (bass), Hugh Jones aka electronic musician Crewdson (concertronica), and Dan Leavers (synths), Stacey darts between animal-like calls over the course of the record, especially on nearly 10-minute album closer “Fox”. On Things That Grow, her companions play sensitively, keeping an eye on her use of the bow as to never overpower it, even with the studio space carefully capturing its nuances. “Sunbird”, full of warm strings and bizarre looped synth, keeps her bow ringing at its core, while it begins to take on the form of a short-seizing robot. Even the eerie bass of “Dark Matter” should go full Wed 21-era Juana Molina on Stacey, its latin-style grooves taking the lead, but they refuse to let it drown her out.
Things That Grow relies heavily on the improvisation of her bandmates and the fluidity with which their melodies play out. The only work composed beforehand by Stacey were melodic aspects and her individual bow parts. Yet that lack of cohesion can drag certain moments of improvisation down. The metal tapping in “Music of the Spheres” veers towards aimlessness in context of the album as a whole. Designated improvisational sections step back for someone else’s solo that occasionally lacks the confidence needed to take over. But improvisation doesn’t have to be indecisive. A track like “Circadian Clocks” treads minimalist repetition with Philip Glass in mind, and, when Stacey reaches far enough, she explores configurations other bow players have yet to publicly investigate, namely bringing the quiet bow into a buzzing room filled with conflicting instruments. For that alone, Things That Grow sees her shoot the image of the bow farther than we’ve come to understand it in the Western world today.
