Grandma Love :: Grandma Love

In Grandma Love, family memory arrives already damaged by the medium that preserved it: VHS tapes, photographs, badly recorded voices, days by the sea left for years inside a box. Tavis Hitchcock does not try to restore them. He works directly with the damage.

Tavis Hitchcock releases this record under the name Grandma Love after the darker and sonically very different work of Karkossyn. The VHS tape is perhaps the most useful object for understanding the album: it alters colours, lets static bleed in, loses definition every time it is copied. Twenty years later those imperfections no longer sit around the memory. They have become part of it.

"Hope So" rests on this disproportion. The chords have an almost old radio-jazz softness, while the drums, blurred into reverb, are what remain of the material substance of memory. A vocal fragment passes through without having too clear a role. Dub and jazz in a Ninja Tune vein, with something at the edges that seems to tip a hat to Edgar Allan Poe. The memory is fragmented and the material grows thinner. The drums do this.

"Solitude Season". The saxophone gives the piece its direction immediately, bringing in something earthly, a little tired, and moving the record away from the packaged nostalgia these sounds could easily suggest. Everything else remains colder, almost synthetic: it does not imitate that past, it passes beside it and retains a kind of digital ghost.

Many records built around childhood choose moments already prepared for memory: a lost house, a death, a decisive summer. Hitchcock seems interested in the rest as well, in what meant nothing at the time. Food bought during a day out. An ordinary blue sky. Someone talking while somebody else adjusts the camera.

In "Oh he's Handsome", beneath the strings and the calls of seagulls, the rhythm retains something from Hitchcock's history with drum & bass. The pulse has been reduced almost to the memory of its own functioning. It can slip past on a first listen. Better that way.

In "Blue Skies" it is worth listening closely to what the horns are doing, and to how much room the track gives melody before allowing it to fray. Here, for once, plain words will do: dreamlike, warm, nostalgic.

"That's Right" contains a recording of Hitchcock's great-grandmother, who recently died at ninety-eight. The presence of the voice is enough. It has a rhythm, an age, a distance from the microphone. Probably a room around it too, however much that room has now been reduced to noise. The backing carries a great deal of that Nineties electronics associated with Kruder & Dorfmeister, but everything lies in the frame: today it does not sound the way it did then, and the record knows it.

It is difficult to listen to this kind of material neutrally. A voice recorded within a family belongs simultaneously to the person and to the machine that held onto it. Tape, compression, lost frequencies, room: everything enters the document. Much of the album's weight comes from this, far more than from any explicit statement about the past.

"Pasties by the Sea" closes with a small scene of food and place: Cornwall, the sea, something eaten during a day out — little more than that, and it is enough.

Grandma Love is short and has very little of the ambition that usually accompanies a record about memory. Hitchcock has gathered domestic material, fragments of family life and a series of sounds that find in their timbre the exact measure of the original idea: to make memory not a theme, but a quality of listening.