All The Mirrors In The House [Home Recordings 1979 - 1986 Volume 1]

In the 29 years that he has helmed the idiosyncratic project His Name Is Alive, Warren Defever has made many different kinds of music, few of them obvious kin to one another: lo-fi bedroom pop, ramshackle ambient, straight-up R&B, spiritual jazz, stoner metal, even a psychedelic rock opera. Recently, Defever came across a box of cassettes—many without covers or cases, the labels scrawled in ballpoint or Sharpie—that lay at the root of all of it: his own adolescent (and preteen) home recordings, from the years predating HNIA. Some went as far back as 1979, when the Livonia, Michigan, native was just 10 years old. He paid fellow Michigander Shelley Salant, of Saturday Looks Good to Me and Tyvek, to make digital transfers of their contents, and he asked her to flag anything that sounded “new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars.” All the Mirrors in the House is the fruit of that harvest: a slim, beguiling album of reverberant ambient made with piano, guitar, and rudimentary electronics—reverb pedal, boombox, 4-track recorder—all as smudged a kindergartener’s chalk drawing. Made without apparent prejudice, and fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, it is an astonishing document of lo-fi alchemy.

On the surface, the sound of all 15 pieces is remarkably simple: They foreground graceful, slow-moving notes wrapped in reverb—though perhaps “foreground” is the wrong word for music that is mostly background. The space of a typical track is a dusky smear; the shape of a melody might suggest itself like the body of a whale slicing its way through cold water before disappearing into the darkness. The opening “Piano Rev” sounds exactly like its title suggests: sustained tones swishing gently in reverse. “Lliadin” is a soft wash of notes, wispy and kelp-like, on what might be a Casio’s string preset. “Something About Hope” multitracks fingerpicked acoustic guitar in wistful counterpoint; “Equally Divided” turns John Cale’s stabbing piano attack aqueous and unsteady. Rarely does a single track seem to use more than one ingredient; taking in the whole album is a little like looking at a backlit bar of homebrewed infusions, each glowing a slightly different shade, but all belonging to the same basic category.

But beneath that outward simplicity lies a deeper layer of mystery, and as the album progresses, its composition becomes even murkier and more mercurial. Judging from the title, “Tape Slow” might be an experiment in playback speeds, but going by the sound of the thing, it might also be something far stranger, perhaps a chorus of Amazonian tree frogs on a muggy night. “Echo Lake” is stirred by faint splashing sounds, like oars in the water; the closing “F Choir” could be a chorus of whirly tubes. The album is sequenced to flow as one seamless suite, a technique that draws extra musicality out of what might otherwise feel sketch-like.

There’s little trace of these songs’ making in their final forms; even Defever professes to remember little about how they were recorded. “By age 10, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother’s LP collection played at the wrong speeds,” Defever recalls in the liner notes; he mentions using boomboxes to simulate multi-tracking, and an early-1980s guitar sampler with one second of memory. But these details are just teasing hints, which is as it should be: Part of the album’s charm is its flat-out improbability. As Mike McGonigal writes in a thoroughly entertaining essay accompanying the album: “Holy shit, whatever you think, this music is far better than it has any reason being.”

It boggles the mind to imagine a suburban teenager in the early ’80s making music like this, even if he did have the legendary Canadian radio show Brave New Waves to help guide his nascent taste for outer-limits sounds. Ambient music was hardly a household concept back then; Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which helped popularize the idea, had been out for only a year before Defever began experimenting with tape.

But for listeners familiar with His Name Is Alive’s catalog, what might be most intriguing is how much All the Mirrors in the House is in keeping with the rest of Defever’s discography. You can hear the same diffuse sounds running through the foggy melancholy of Livonia, his debut album; jump forward to 2017’s Black Wings, a workbook of ideas and alternate takes from the 2016 rock record Patterns of Light, and you’ll find exactly the same sorts of drones that form All the Mirrors in the House. “There’s such a unifying element to all of it that’s been there since the beginning,” Defever said of his work in an interview in late 2000, before the release of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth. Some details might change, he said, “but ultimately it’s the same feelings, the same perspectives, the same emotions every time in every song.” All the Mirrors in the House bears that out: It captures the essence of an idea that has bounced through his music ever since in a never-ending chain of reflections.