The synth compositions of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami are deep and romantic, uniquely designed to pull you into them.
Meditation and improvisation are very different practices, but the sprawling synth music of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami makes them nearly imperceptible. The key to doing either successfully is often mindfulness; a focus on the self, an awareness of breath, and the ability to completely give yourself to the moment. Chami proved this in Good Willsmith, her trio with Max Allison and Doug Kaplan, where the commitment to improvisation extended to entire albums of heroically psychedelic single-takes. Allison and Kaplan’s colorful avant-garde label Hausu Mountain provided a launch point for Chami’s solo project TALSounds, where her classically-trained voice flowed calmly through synths, tape-delays, and loop pedals. While early releases were uncut recordings, Chami employed subtle editing on 2018’s Love Sick before going further on her new album Acquiesce, making songs out of longer improvisations and applying vocal overdubs. But don’t mistake the title or enhanced production for any sort of compromise: Acquiesce is the most fully-realized TALsounds album to date.
Acquiesce is TALsounds at their most turbulent, where the additional production emphasizes the rawest and most tender moments. The first track on Acquiesce is an instrumental appropriately titled “Opening,” not for describing a starting point, but implying an action that runs naturally throughout the album. On previous albums, Chami’s voice and synths would often form a dense unified sound, but on “Soar” they take their own trajectories. The soft arpeggios rushing under melismatic vocals compliment each other, but it’s just as engaging when they’re at odds. “Dynasty” begins with silvery synth lines and Chami’s voice in an upper opera register, until an elastic, glitchy synth interrupts and the song unspools into a delirious collage of looping vocals. But rather than disrupting the project’s zen atmosphere, this dynamic enhances it, as if we’re hearing her work through the tension and release in real time. “Dynasty” is reoriented by the fuzzy, heartrending organ instrumental “Conveyor,” the album’s shortest and most breathlessly beautiful track.
Acquiesce always goes deeper rather than bigger. TALsounds has always been an inwardly focused project by nature, but these songs feel uniquely designed to pull you into them. The album grows darker in its second half, but there’s a warmth and safety there just like the dimly lit shot of the bedside table on its cover. The faintly atonal synths streaking through “Else” and “Instance” create a dead-of-night intimacy but Chami, like Grouper’s Liz Harris, has an innate ability to light these moments with her voice like a will-o’-the-wisp. It resolves on the penultimate “Muted Decision,” where she tunes a lone-synth to uncannily mimic a muted-trumpet. It’s a moment akin to stumbling through your home in the dark, only to have your eyes adjust and recognize the people and things you love most.
Chami has described making this album during a period of new love, a time of happiness, but also of questioning that happiness when she found herself recording less. For a project defined by its constant and improvisational process, not to mention one that doubles as meditative practice, it’s an understandable anxiety. But the true brilliance of the album is how she channels those life tensions through that same creative process. As its final track “No Restoring” glimmers into view, Acquiesce reveals itself in hindsight as the now-engaged musician’s most romantic album. It’s easy to confuse acquiescence for a sort of defeat, but TALsounds frames it more as an acceptance of life’s endless change. We are all constantly improvising with what life throws at us, but the meditative majesty of Acquiesce suggests that with a different perspective, we can let it flow straight through us.
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