Music | Arts & Culture | COVID-19
| Laura Wolf Album Art. |
The synth rolls in, so natural it seems that it was always meant to be there. Vocals float, at once mush-mouthed and ethereal. Percussion edges onto the track, as if someone is snapping a giant rubber band back and forth. It's clear that a musician’s finger has landed on a board and started making magic. The only logical thing to do is get up and dance.
“Love in the time of quarantine” comes from musician Laura Wolf, who has been producing tracks for her new Meditations and Quarantine Demos from her parents’ New Haven attic while in isolation from COVID-19. In real time, both releases are earworm-worthy, aural snapshots into the artist’s life and process as she hunkers down and stays put. They are both available for streaming and purchase on Wolf's website and Bandcamp page.
“All songs were written/produced/recorded by me in my parents' attic while in quarantine from THE covid 19,” she wrote with the release of Quarantine Demos last month. “The personal challenge is to complete a song in some form each day.”
On the album, that form fits function: there’s a snappy quality to the music without it ever feeling too rough-hewn. In “Parvane,” Wolf kicks off the album with a clubby, controlled kind of indie noise, made for a stage where a cello and a synthesizer can get down and dirty with world music. The suggestion of a guitar swoops in from somewhere, then is gone before the listener knows to miss it. She rides the sound with soaring, layered vocals that turn from bird-like to whispering.
This is background music (think study date, but with musical acumen) meets a mellow, much-needed dance party: it feels wilder than the “cello glitch pop” by which the artist classifies her own practice. A listener leans into “love in the time of quarantine,” and can feel nostalgic for steel drum concerts and Swedish electropop and sweat-flecked close dancing all at once. In “light leaks,” there’s a cello hook that grabs one’s ear, and leads into a sort of lulling, adult nursery rhyme.
The demos are not without urgency: “after the crash” is at once slow and propulsive, walking a tightrope between the two with the sound of Wolf's voice. By “when can we go outside”—a question that listeners too may be asking—it’s hard to stay still.
Between the lyrics is a backstory that has become commonplace: Wolf had gigs lined up in New York and Connecticut through early April, at venues that have since closed their doors for the foreseeable future. She manages to tell it in a completely idiosyncratic way, with a small, just-tinny-enough symphony of sound from a single room.
Her Meditations, meanwhile, are wonderfully different in scope. While the Quarantine Demos are danceable—it is hard to listen to them and not to move, particularly if you have been looking at the same walls for the better part of two months—her three current meditations are calming and contemplative, as if they’re meant to go with candles and tiny, bronze prayer bells.
In the longest, a track from April 10 that runs just short of 20 minutes, Wolf submerges her listener in a wash of chimes and bells, with the tinny sides of singing bowls that seem like they could go on forever. The piece is a close, polite cousin to stillness and breath, so calming that it could be a soundtrack for sleep itself.
Others are soaked in synth, like a great, pulsating wave rising out of a slate-colored sea. In a meditation from April 12, Wolf conjures a steely steadiness that sounds alien and almost familiar at the same time. If a listener knows Jóhann Jóhannsson, it sounds close enough to the late composer’s work that missing him hurts.
As her quarantine stretches on, Wolf has continued to produce. In a series of social media posts this and last month, she’s provided short updates on the work, with shoutouts to musicians who have jumped in to contribute musically despite the physical distance.
“It’s been a really wild challenge and I feel like I’m growing a lot as a producer,” she wrote. “More to come.”