Gia Margaret :: Singing
For Gia Margaret, singing was never the obvious thing: between There's Always Glimmer and now there's a damaged vocal cord, two instrumental albums born out of silence, a whole grammar of ambient built because the voice was missing.
Singing is the return to voice as gesture, not as default. She sings because she can again, not because she always has — and a voice that comes back after an absence doesn't sing the way it did: it sings like someone who has learned that song can be revoked. This is the threshold the whole record balances on, the limen that makes it, paradoxically, the most tuie and the least tuie of recent records: inside for its atmospheres, at the margin for that pop legibility which doesn't usually live around here. But that legibility isn't a concession to taste. It's the sound of someone who had to relearn how to be audible.
"Everyone Around Me Dancing" does something precious right away. The vocal carries the grown phrasing of late-period Everything but the Girl — confiding, addressed to a listener, aware it wants to be loved — but underneath there's none of the support you'd expect: a stripped-down bed that turns into a gap rather than a cushion. And into that gap comes Arve Henriksen's trumpet, breath more than brass, jazzing the edge just slightly and holding the track in a zone of shadow — the same one as the concept and the video, her watching the party from the wings, shut out from the communal joy and, for exactly that reason, closer to the ground, to the planet. Telling, that there's no chorus: the song watches the others dance and refuses to dance, stays inside its aside, its monologue. That it's Henriksen of all people breathing into that margin is no small detail: he carries the whole of ECM with him, the northern breath that turns to orison, and sets it down on a bed that pulls toward pop.
"Alive Inside" takes that distance to its conclusion. Here she's so far from the source that she prays — to a god, a friend who's gone, a spirit, whoever might hear. The voice lifts and snags in a thicket of saturation, as if in reaching she were forcing the very boundary of the sayable: she prays, and the briar that holds her burns. Underneath, the bed stays mineral, detrital, grained: it carries the melody plainly, though the melody has its own quiet comeliness, that light, unhurried pop. To pray inside a saturation, and to do it with a gentle melody, is the same reclamation — the sayable wrested from a resistance, and you understand here that this record's sweetness is a friction overcome, not an ease granted.
"Moon Not Mine": an arpeggio and the voice carry you back to a folk barely sketched — under a full moon, eclipsing, him turning the lake onto its side — with synthetic and instrumental incursions, a sound-garden you seem to hear flowering, where every cell of timbre is a bud opening out of season. The close is almost a physical revelation — I feel my soul singing and my heart beating — and that singing we'll leave for last, because it's where the record names itself, and it'll be worth coming back to.
"Ambient for Ichiko" is the instrumental rest, and it works like fallow ground: the field of the voice left to lie so it comes back fertile. Bright cells of arp synth reflecting like rays through leaves, a Kosmische Musik of the Berlin school that nonetheless inhabits rural ground — the cosmic that aims at the leaves instead of the stars, German abstraction put under cultivation, komorebi instead of neon. Kosmische transplanted into a vegetable patch.
"Guitar Duo" takes that silence to its conclusion: it's the second instrumental, the second room where the voice absents itself, and you understand that keeping quiet, too, is part of the convalescence — the held breath before the sentence. Pure image-making — crossing lands and landscapes on the abraded tape of memory. Tape, pitches that sway, the tremor of a medium giving way, all of it reverbed with no tail but with a time of its own. A brief exercise in pastoral, of which Bibio is the acknowledged master, the aesthetic of tape as ploughed earth.
And "E-Motion" is the natural continuation of that gesture: the voice goes to vocoder and sings a melody left behind, abandoned there; the sonic layer holds only the load-bearing notes, and memory kneads together until the matter turns to sand. This is where the erosion that began in "Alive Inside" closes: the bed was stone, mineral, detrital; now it's loosened grain, dust and orbit. A close that, were it not for the voice, would graze vintage jazz-rock
And here singing returns, the word drawn out syllable by syllable, the album's title spoken inside a song. It's no self-referential flourish: it's the endpoint of the convalescence. A voice that names itself while it sings is a voic caught in the wonder of still being able to. This pop that at times asks to be liked rewards long listening, and rewards it well — and it's maybe its least sayable virtue, the one that won't go on the record: not the ease of someone who never doubted her own singing, but the grace of someone who found it again
