Xylouris White
The Forest In Me
Label: Drag City
Genre: World Music
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Once you have set the needle down on the record and heard for yourself the intimacies and impressionism, abstraction and unfiltered emotion found in The Forest In Me, Xylouris White’s fifth album release (and first since 2019’s The Sisypheans), you may wonder what was the mood of the room in which this music came to be. Only three people can say for sure, and even then...
Guy Picciotto: In late 2019, we had begun taking steps to working on new material. In a haphazard fashion, Jim and I started tracking drums in my basement, cutting them up into shapes with no set landing in mind. Some of it we sent to Giorgos in Crete–he responded with his lyra and his lute. Without intention we had initiated a process that would soon become more ruthlessly mandated by the world events that separated and isolated us to three corners of the globe in the following year.
Giorgos Xylouris: Every harmonic is a fallen tree trunk that I climb over. I’m stepping in muddy waters in the woods or coming to a clearing–that is part of the journey I take whether I am playing music with an audience or recording alone. It’s a journey around the forest of my inner self. That’s how I see it.
Jim White: I ended up in the pandemic in rural Australia on care duty and then back in Melbourne alone in a house with an imminent, ultimately very long lock down.
Giorgos: The past several years created a very particular situation that none of us had ever lived through, in such seclusion in our homes and within ourselves. In the isolation I found other wrinkles/folds in my inner being. That helped create this music, as did the unusual way we went about recording.
Jim: The night before the curfew I acquired some mics from a studio and bought an interface. And learnt to record. And tracked. George tracked in Crete. Guy, in New York, helped assemble the structures and find combinations.
Giorgos: So every note, every phrase, every instrument came from in and around our inner forests.
Guy: On previous projects our customary way of working was to be in one room all together; an inward facing triangle of instant communication leading to marathon sessions from which we would build an archive from which to sculpt the records, finding the binding lines that connected the state-ments we were trying to make.
Giorgos: Using whatever instruments I had with me in the studio at home, in the silence I discovered things I hadn’t had the peace to uncover previously. I saw that music isn’t static, moving only in its usual ways within the parameters of its centrifugal force–it can move a long way further in other directions.
Guy: With this record we still had that stash to draw from but now we were also adding material composed from this enforced new geometry; this different, wider triangle where we each assumed different roles than we had previously with writing, engineering, arranging all mixed up like finger paints.
Giorgos: While we were recording, I noticed that the music had a certain solitude about it, both from the title and from inside. That led us to find more music from within that we had not yet discovered.
Jim: The idea emerged, naturally nourished and nourishing a record with none of our usual angles and themes, no verbal language, no angst nor sudden dynamics, a more subtle structure. And we found The Forest In Me.