The title of Macie Stewart’s second solo album, When the Distance Is Blue, is borrowed from Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Blue of Distance,” a meditation on longing. The Chicago composer and multi-instrumentalist’s album, an eight-part suite of improvisational chamber ambient, is tinted by the limpid colors of an in-between space, peering across absence without attempting to resolve or subdue it. Her pieces for prepared piano, string quartet, voice, and field recordings drift weightlessly; with minimal tools, Stewart crafts multitudes.
The album began with Stewart’s improvisations on piano, her first instrument, which she prepared in the studio with contact mics and small objects. It took further shape as she started incorporating recordings from an archive of audio documents gathered during a year on the road, channeling the perpetual ungroundedness of touring into aqueous shapes, and hoping to “evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” she has said. “No matter where I am, there’s always something that’s far away from me,” she told an interviewer. But her collaborators here—friends and fellow members of the Chicago experimental scene—keep her rooted. Extemporaneous cello from longtime collaborator Lia Kohl enlivens album opener “I Forget How to Remember My Dreams”; on “Murmuration/Memorization,” Kohl’s cello and Whitney Johnson’s viola blend with wordless vocals, Stewart conducting the air like a choir. Swelling drones saturate the atmosphere, broken only by pointillist plucks near the track’s end.
The central presence of piano and a lack of lyrics set When the Distance Is Blue apart from nearly everything else in Stewart’s varied catalog, save for her 2020 record with Kohl. There are only minimal traces of her art-rock duo Finom or the cross-pollinated folk of her solo debut, Mouth Full of Glass. Instead, stripping away the complexity of her previous work, she sounds inspired by the nuanced focus her collaborators have shown on albums like Kohl’s The Ceiling Reposes and Johnson’s Sonescent.
Lead single and album centerpiece “Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” is both lush and exploratory, built around repeating piano figures and bell-like chimes. Stewart’s collagist approach succeeds whether she is improvising with a trio of other players (Kohl, Johnson, and double bassist Zach Moore) or overlaying vocal improvisations recorded in a Parisian apartment building (“Stairwell (Before and After)”). She is magnetized to the uncertain, unknown, and uncomfortable, observing textured, complex terrain and rendering it in sound.
A pair of field recordings were born from Stewart’s desire to draw the world around her into the music. She recorded “Tsukiji,” flooded with voices and shuffling footsteps, at the Tokyo fish market of the same name; when a car engine emerges, it sounds almost musical, buzzing high above the din. Recorded at the Osaka airport, “In Between” is a microcosm of transience, droning strings swimming through a sea of conversation. Though fleeting, these interstitial tracks help to sustain the album’s spiritual core, informing the slow presence of the longer pieces.
“The blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles,” writes Solnit; “the blue of distance.” That is precisely the hue Stewart achieves here, blurring wordless humming with lyrical strings, laughter, drones, airport PA announcements, eerily detuned keys, and an undercurrent of nameless yearning.
