She’s not making perfume. On her newest recording, “Drifts and Surfaces,” Saxl pushes out of the ambient toward the extreme, making tiny fragments of live percussion clot and tremble until they generate an awesome blur — a sound that Saxl says was inspired by her life on Wisconsin’s Madeline Island in Lake Superior. “I was trying to capture the sense of disappearing horizon, lostness, awe and dark power that feels really innate to Lake Superior,” she explains in the notes posted on her Bandcamp page. “It is also constantly changing — drifts change directions, water becomes ice, ice breaks apart and becomes waves. There is constant movement from drifts to surfaces, surfaces to drifts.”
“The Blue of Distance,” Saxl’s outstanding 2021 album, conveyed similar ideas, using synthesizers and woodwinds to pantomime weather and water, all while playing little tricks on your eardrums, making them wonder whether they were experiencing the intimacy of human breath or an airless digital facsimile. There’s a similar game afoot in the swells of “Drifts and Surfaces,” with Saxl claiming that these tremulous, high-def pulses could resemble droplets in a lake as easily as they could represent data in a cloud.
Is this music about the collision of nature and technology? For sure. But perhaps in the same way that turning pieces of wood into a violin counts as a collision of nature and technology. Those two entangled worlds aren’t always so oppositional. But be careful. Go too far in that direction and we start flirting with utopian technocratic woo-woo. Saxl’s music doesn’t seem to be arguing in either direction. Instead, it simply seems to be capturing what is — a cascade of raindrops and data points gathering in the shape of the truth.
