Saariselka – The Ground Our Sky

Temporary Residence

The recent collaboration between Date Palms‘ Marielle Jakobsons and Cali guitarist Chuck Johnson under the name Saariselka has yielded an album of exquisitely crafted and slow-moving beauty that employs steel guitar and the romantic thrum of Fender Rhodes to devastating effect.

Slowing everything down so that it has full opportunity to enter us in the right way and merge with our thinking, the opening melody of “Horizons” is sparse and pure, gleaming like sunlight from the speakers. When the strains of pedal steel join, they are like a spirit companion to the drifting organ making its way through a sunlit meadow. The whole thing just shines and shimmers, not so that we would be blinded, but so that it salves us somehow, warming our cold bones. and allowing us to savour every drop of existence that comes our way.

The slow tempo is a thing of comfort, and the repetitive country-tinged guitar of “Into The Wind” picks out a few notes and scatters them like silver across the desert floor. It reminds me a little of Bruce Licher‘s Scenic and the way that band’s slow burning sound would unfold in the flurry of a desert wind. It evokes that same feeling of distance under such huge skies, but here a heavenward stretch adds further magic. A gradual trek across huge panoramas, the choice notes and the reverb haze leaving a trail of dust, so that when Marielle’s voice arrives, it is like the traveller’s angel, sitting over the shoulder, wishing them onward as the sun begins to set.

The gaseous reverb of “Subsurface” fills the vista with charge, and the slow, weightless parade of the organ, guitar and pedal steel make for a light, almost insubstantial display that gradually recedes into nothing. Saariselka really know how to play for maximum effect, but with barely a wisp of volume. Nothing is loud and everything is left to move at its own pace. The way that the notes are allowed to fall somehow from the organ on the sombre “Neochrome” is uncanny; they seem to drop fully formed, shiny and loved into the twinkling atmosphere and it is just divine. The pedal steel here must be the most subtle I have even heard, but is also the most cosmic. However, this is not in a psychedelic fashion, just in a merging with the stars as pregnant piano notes way.

There is the faintest reminiscence of Julee Cruise in the vocals for “Void”, but without that Twin Peaks sentimentality, and the slow carousel of organ notes is the perfect backdrop to launch it at a gravity-defying pace. The whole thing is so warm and enveloping yet open to the elements. Nothing stifles here, and as the staccato notes and faint woolly drift of closer “Afterlight” begin to emerge like watching fireflies as dusk falls, the sheer relaxation and apparent lack of care is an absolute tonic. After playing it through once, I just stuck it straight back on again and the whole thing worked as perfectly the second time. Marielle and Chuck have struck gold on The Ground Our Sky, weightless and dusty, but gold nonetheless.

-Mr Olivetti-