Juni Habel :: Evergreen In Your Mind
Norwegian, third time out, an hour south of Oslo. The biographical detail counts for little. It counts for more to know that evergreen, in the title, names the memory that won't fade.
The last bell rings and the building empties in minutes. It's in that hour — the empty classroom, the school piano, the chairs left at odd angles — that Juni Habel recorded part of this album. She teaches. When the day is done she stays inside the rooms and switches on something that catches the sound.
Norwegian, third time out, an hour south of Oslo. The biographical detail counts for little. It counts for more to know that evergreen, in the title, names the memory that won't fade — the evergreen of the mind, what stays with you once the rest of the wood has dropped its leaves, undying without being a tree or a song about undying. And where does she draw it from, someone who works where other people's childhood passes through every day and never stops? Not her own nostalgia, but a nostalgia in transit, the kind that settles in a classroom the way dust settles on a sill, layer on layer of years that aren't hers.
"Another High" opens almost devotionally — a circular piece, and along the way synth tones gather, surfacing like echoes from below barely caught, the chorus brightening, air passing between the notes. "I'd Like To See It" carries the verse right to the threshold of the chorus and there, instead of singing, the song steps aside: a synth interlude takes the place of the words.
"Pearl Cloud Song" is where the thesis takes on flesh. An American primitive piece — the guitar turning over a tuning she stumbled into, fingers braiding lines the way Fahey does when he stops trying to prove anything — but underneath, keeping time, a four-to-the-floor kick, dry, metronomic. A strange and lovely choice: American fingerstyle lives on rubato, on breath, on time that bends; setting a rigid beat beneath it is like tethering a kite to an anvil. And yet it holds, because that beat carries presence rather than rhythm — the body that stays in the room.
The title track, at the centre, mines a different seam: the fingerstyle is soft, and there's a deliberate EQ choice that cuts against the grain — mids pushed forward, highs filed down, that midrange-heavy sound 1970s folk had not by taste but by constraint, tape that couldn't hold the frequency extremes and smeared everything into one warm narrow band. Habel rebuilds that technical limit as if it were a colour: she isn't imitating the past, she's tuning the sound to the matter of the record, which is memory — and memory sounds like this, muffled, without brilliance. The voice settles into it and you can never quite tell whether it leads or is led.
"Stand So Still" is where you measure what this record actually is: technical refinement that unfolds slowly, without a single flaw, sought-after imperfections included, the kind singer-songwriter folk usually keeps on hand to seem human. Right after, "Gitarhum" does what the name says — an apiary instrumental, the drone of a hive left in the sun while no one comes to gather, field recordings and strings turning into atmosphere. The instrumentals live on an American primitive that carries neither nordic cold nor desert dust, an American primitive that has come indoors and set about weaving the air of the room.
Toward the end the register drops further. "Sage" sits lowest, a harmonium holding the bottom like a piece of furniture too big for the room, and over it a guitar counting something, the days maybe, with the dull patience of someone keeping watch on an absence. "Colours Close To Me" plays on doubled voices, and "Statues" closes on her own image, love dying like a statue abandoned to the sea, forgotten there — the least consoling ending on the record.
There's an objection, and it should be said. A record all at the same temperature, the same uncanny stillness, risks blurring into indistinctness: eleven tracks that could be one long one. To demand variation, though, is to fall into a question of form the record has already resolved on its own terms — this is a case where the sameness is the argument, not a lapse in it.
Forty-one minutes, all pleasantly of that northern-European skew that doesn't seek the centre.
