There’s something inscrutable and implacable about the music of the Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson. His journey from the edges of the avant-garde to touring with Bon Iver and Arcade Fire has an inexorable feel to it, as if Stetson pushed his way to prominence wielding nothing but the mighty sound wrung from his chosen instrument. Sarah Neufeld, a violinist who has been a permanent member of Arcade Fire since their second album, is a kindred spirit: She brings a highly unconventional ear to her instrument and also seems to wander between genres without much fuss. The pair even share an avid interest in yoga—Neufeld has opened a studio, and Stetson has talked about the role yoga plays in his discipline, both in assisting with his demanding circular-breath style and in the mindfulness it cultivates.
Neufeld and Stetson worked together on the score to the 2013 film Blue Caprice, and on Never were the way she was, they achieve a kind of ecstatic communion. The eight pieces on the album feel simultaneously contemplative and busy—the sound of active minds idling in a lower gear. The record is fantastic morning music, its tone and pace mirroring the moment in the day when your thoughts are murmuring, not yet speaking, and all you sense are their shades. It is too eventful, its surface too agitated, to be ambient, but it might help you think more clearly anyway.
Neufeld and Stetson’s pieces start with something very simple and build layers that you can hear stack and slot into place. Stetson is a virtuoso, the sort of player whose technical feats change people’s perceptions of what his instrument can do. But the pieces on Never were the way she was are laid out as simply and clearly as a children’s story. Each time, Neufeld and Stetson begin with an undulating pulse, their two instruments working busily to create the illusion of one massive one (some kind of amplified church organ, maybe, that hasn’t been created yet). Once they’ve hit this point, they hold there, letting the multifaceted sound soak in.
Each piece on the album has a different pulse, with its own quality and clarity: Neufeld’s eerily smooth bowing on "Won’t be a thing to become" mirrors Stetson’s long-breathed, even tone, creating a glassy and impenetrable sonic surface. On "In the vespers", Stetson flutters his fingers over a few keys, making a wailing, high-pitched riff, and Neufeld bows sharp double stops beneath it. It’s an anxious sound, and listening to the jagged little peaks and valleys it hits is its own perversely pleasurable discomfort.
The mood behind these pieces is amorphous, but there is a steely, elemental feel to the album that suggests pre-industrial times. On the unmistakably baleful "With the dark hug of time" Stetson’s hammering fingers on the keys make a "CHUNK" that suggests the sound of a stomping kick drum, and he plays in the lowest ranges of his instrument, where the sub frequencies aren’t too far off from a drone-metal band. This kind of buzzing, physically upsetting drone is an inherently primordial sound, and the piece feels more than a little 2001-obelisk. The scrapes and thuds embedded in the otherwise smoothly rolling "The rest of us" send a similar message. Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals—the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves. Never were the way she was has a bracing air, an implicit reminder of the things that can be done with two instruments and two hands.
