Jason Kahn
"Days Falling"
(2021)
Editions 011
Double LP

Jason Kahn // voice, acoustic guitar

Edition of 100
Heavy weight 180 gram vinyl.
Hand-painted covers on thick gray cardboard.
Liner notes.

A. Buried Child (16.06)
B. The Unseen Hand (14.09)
C. Across the Night (5.53)
Far in Mind (8.35)
D. To See That Heaven (15.27)

Recorded April 9, 2020 in Zürich at Kunstraum Walcheturm.

Recording, mixing, mastering, liner notes and LP artwork Jason Kahn.

Many thanks to Patrick Huber for allowing me to record in Kunstraum Walcheturm.

Download liner notes here.

Far in Mind

These pieces were recorded during one evening on April 9, 2020 in Zürich, my home for the last twenty-one years. I rode my bike through the rainy night to the Kunstraum Walcheturm, a place where I’ve recorded many times before. The city felt abandoned. We were in the midst of the first of several Covid lockdowns. Except for supermarkets and pharmacies, most places were closed. Public transportation was still running but was hardly being used. Nearly empty buses and trams drove by. For once, the streets were practically free of traffic. There was hardly anyone in sight on the Langstrasse, normally a clot of drug dealers, prostitutes, students and tourists roving from bar to bar in a drunken, obliterated haze.

I could've felt sad at all the loss of life, but somehow I was elated at the strangeness of the situation. I especially noticed how the city sounded now. Every little noise seemed to jump out at me. I rang the bell of my bike. It resonated in the empty streets like a giant church bell. I've lived in large cities all my life, but I'd hardly ever experienced them so quiet as this. Maybe if I was lucky, in those moments before dawn, did a city reach this level of serenity. But this never lasted long, and with the rise of the sun a city's roar returned again. Zürich had been this quiet for weeks now.

Once inside the Kunstraum Walcheturm, the sense of solitude deepened. I had this large empty room to myself. Just one chair and a spotlight above. A pair of microphones stood before me. All I had to do was sit down and play. On this evening I felt like I was singing for the city outside. To fill, at least in my mind, that void of the empty streets with my voice and the sounds coming from my guitar. Of course, I had no songs to sing. I was just improvising with the feeling of this desolation and strange sense of peacefulness in the midst of so much tragedy and suffering. I hadn't even been planning on doing this, but I'd coincidentally spoken a few days earlier with Patrick Huber, the Kunstraum Walcheturm's founder, and he mentioned that the room was free. Everything in his schedule had been canceled indefinitely.

I sat down and started the recorder. After each piece I took a short break to tune the guitar and give my voice a rest. After nearly two hours I'd recorded all the pieces you have here on these two LP's. Nothing has been remixed or edited. I wanted to preserve the continuity and flow of the music from the moment it was created, capturing that brief space in time where my feelings and inspiration congealed into the sounds you have before you now. This record is like a postcard to myself, from a strange time and place that even now as I write this, in the midst of yet another form of lockdown, seems like a frightening dream I once had and not something I actually ever lived through.

I filed the recordings away and didn't really give them much thought for quite some time. I hadn't been thinking of a release when I went to record these pieces. If anything, this was just a product of chance -- having a space to record in suddenly available to me -- and being in a situation where I sensed the need to document what I was feeling. A kind of field recording of my soul's environment. Only after around six months did I give the recordings a listen again. I was immediately stuck by their sparseness and slow movement. At times, the pieces felt like they were on the verge of disappearing into the empty night outside. Maybe I had been trying to fill this void but was also somehow hesitant to intrude on the sense of quiet, which in itself was like a kind of monument to the situation we were all living through. I teetered above an abyss of emptiness with the need to sing out for all the life we still had left in us, despite the world crawling to a halt around us.

The title Days Falling spoke to my feeling of each day falling from above, like a plodding rain, belligerent in its insistence to never completely stop. Each day tumbling down over us, casting a long shadow across our psychic landscapes. The weight just won't let up. We plod on but there seems to be no end in sight, just living for the next day and hoping that that next day will somehow be better, or at least less worse, than the day before. One day falling to the wayside to make space for the next. Like a slow-motion avalanche of time, a morass of days tumbling down across the empty city below. A sense of time lost hangs heavy in the emptiness of the shuttered buildings. Where has everybody gone? Where have the days gone? The resonance of each day comes crashing down, echoes in my mind, fills my dreams. To wake to another day like the one before, windblown streets, an empty aluminum can scraping noisily across the sidewalk, a stray dog barking, sirens in the distance all around us. The only consolation is the birds, singing more loudly than ever, their tiny voices rising above the call of ambulances and cold gusts of wind blasting in from the east. Where the Alps rise up snow-capped and majestic, like a vision we once had of better times, better places. Blue skies and the dazzling sunlight refracting off the banks of snow like a vast field of diamonds.

When thinking of titles for these recordings, memories of Sam Shepard, one of my favorite writers and personalities, came to mind. He died more than a few years back, but I'd recently been rereading some of his short stories and poems. The existential depth of his work seemed fitting for what I was feeling when I made these recordings, thinking about what was unseen, unspoken, maybe never experienced outside of dreams or nightmares. The cumulative effect sometimes being we never know what is right before our eyes. Is it a dream or a waking reality? With so much death and sickness around us, I was of course worried about my kids. I'd already lost my daughter Louise, who died in her sleep when she was just a few months old. This is The Buried Child in this recording. The title taken from Shepard's play of the same name. Something not secret to us but maybe we wish it were. A yawning fear that never leaves us. I felt this so often in the time of these recordings, worried about another child to bury.

Likewise, The Unseen Hand takes its title from another one of Shepard's plays. Here, the title spoke to me more than the content of the play itself, which is something closer to science fiction than anything else. Still, I often ask myself what is the unseen hand which guides us. What pushes us along when we no longer have the strength to move forward? The unseen hand which wakes us from our sleep, cradles us in its palm, slaps us around when we're being stupid or embarrassing ourselves but don't know it. As Diego Maradona so succinctly put it, it is the hand of God. This is the hand which scored the goal, the unseen hand swatting us from here to there. The hand we clasp when it's time to go, pulling us to the other side. The title Across the Night chronicles just what I was thinking on the night of these recordings. Wondering what lies across the night, what all my friends are doing, how they are coping. What a misery as this world turns from night into morning and back to night again. All I could see when I closed my eyes to go to sleep that night after making these recordings were the stars burning down across the black nighttime skies. I was thinking of all the different times and places I looked up at these stars, perhaps asking the same questions about what lay in store for us across the night. The stars map this journey for us, a journey, as Ferdinand Céline so beautifully described it, to the end of the night.

Far in Mind would be that place I go to when I can't escape these thoughts, this cold fear of uncertainty and life slowly grinding down to a halt, like a new ice age. Those huge glaciers slowly grinding their way through my soul, deep fissure carved, the scars of so many days left behind. Better forgotten, though hard as we try, these days cling to us like a bitter rain. Far in mind lies beyond the horizon, across the galaxies, in places we've only imagined or dreamed of. Places where we belong and would like to return to one day. A meditation on these places far in mind but yet right there before us, alive and true and beckoning us on. A shelter from the storm of sirens and empty streets. How often have I traveled far in mind only to find myself in the blink of an eye right back here again. An oscillation between all these spaces in my mind, dark caverns and blinding beams of light. Far in mind is where I would be if I could be.

The title of the last piece To See That Heaven was taken from the lyrics to Stevie Wonder's song Golden Lady. And actually, the entire verse is to see that heaven in your eyes is not so far, which could be considered as one of my personal mantras. Because what is it we see when we look into the eyes of the one we love? It is that heaven which is always there but which we only notice in love. In these hard times how easy it is to forget that heaven, to not see those eyes. Standing before a mirror we look into our own eyes. We see only fear, uncertainty, sadness. Our aura burns brightly around us but we see only darkness. Heaven might as well be a million light years away if we can't see it, if our eyes are blind to it. Each day I try to see that heaven, though it often eludes me. But there is still the notion that it exists, that I'm part of it. That it's waiting there for me to come back and open my eyes to what has never left. To see that heaven.

These days the streets are alive again. Sunlight fills the air. People are out and about in the parks and at the lake. The stores are busy, restaurants full. It's even hard to find a seat in the bus again. The time before seems like a collective dream we once had. A dream which still casts a long shadow across my soul. Now it's been more than a year since I recorded these pieces. I find this period hard to go back to. It was a dark place but somehow there was a light, and I think at the time that through this music I was able to find my own north star, guiding me out of the darkness.

Reviews:

> Guillaume Bonhomme, Le Son du Grislin, 6.2021
Dans le texte qui accompagne Days Falling, double album et onzième référence du label Editions, Jason Kahn revient sur les circonstances de son enregistrement. Le 9 avril 2020, la Kunstraum Walcheturm de Zürich est vide pour cause de confinement. L'américain, qui connaît bien l’endroit, s’y rend à vélo pour s’y enregistrer à la guitare et à la voix : "Of course, I had no songs to sing."
Le trajet qu’il a fait de chez lui à l’espace d’exposition l’a sûrement marqué : la foule habituelle ne court plus les rues, alors le bruit des rues n’est plus le même. Celui qui se souvenait dans In Place d'expériences d’écoute in situ raconte le changement qu’une prudence nécessaire sans doute a opéré sur la ville qu’il habite depuis plus de vingt ans. Et puis, il y a le danger qui rôde, faiseur d’inquiétudes qui le ramènent à un ancien drame dont il redoute la répétition : Buried Child, la première des cinq pièces du double vinyle, fait ainsi de quelques cordes arrachées et de l’extraction d’un ancien appel à l’aide une mélopée insaisissable. On pourra évoquer Robert Johnson, Kan Mikami ou Jandek, l’expression de Kahn a toujours pour origine l’endroit où il se trouve pour improviser : « I was just improvising with the feeling of this desolation of strange sense of peacefulness in the midst of so much tragedy and suffering. » Or, bientôt, disparaît le contexte pour laisser place à la lente extraction d’un langage, à la domestication d’une angoisse aussi. Effleurant la guitare ou tirant au petit bonheur – le chant peut emporter un geste et ainsi obliger la main, car c’est le chant qui commande le reste –, le musicien agrémente sa première expression d’imprévus qui l’enrichissent. Documentant son « rapport au monde » autant que sa pratique musicale, Jason Kahn poursuit ce projet qu’il nous expliquait voici presque dix ans : « Mes travaux récents représentent cette lutte, cette tentative de trouver ma voie à travers les ténèbres et de surmonter les obstacles du quotidien. » Heureusement quand l’heure est grave, son art gagne en intensité.

>Frans deWaard, Vital Weekly, 6.2021
Here's another surprise record from Jason Kahn. Like so many musicians he was locked up for most of 2020 and during the first lockdown, he rode his bicycle through the streets of his hometown Zürich, on his way to Kunstraum Walcheturm, where he recorded many times before. The streets were empty, most shops closed and people inside. In the studio, there was also nobody and Kahn picked up a guitar, set up a few microphones and started to sing and play the guitar. He played for two hours, giving his voice rest after each song and tuning the guitar. Then he went home and didn't revisit the recordings for six months, not thinking about a release. In the lengthy liner notes, he describes this process and then about the various titles for these pieces. There has been editing of mixing in these pieces, things are as they were recorded on April 9, 2020. This record has five pieces, of which three spans an entire LP side.

I heard a lot of music from Jason Kahn, and it is fair to say this is among his most radical works in sound. The guitar is not played in any way that is requiring three chords, hell, one chord, but open-ended plucking of strings, making up things as he moves along, and in his singing, it is not about words but sounds he creates with his mouth. Gurgling, whispering non-words, screaming and everything else that is humanly possible to do with the voice. It is intimate and at the same time very expressive. It is about control of both instruments, sometimes repeating certain fragments and phrases, but it is also about chaos and madness, a cry for freedom if you want; a man captured in solitude, letting it all out (and mind you, I don't think a lockdown because of COVID-19 equals losing freedom; I have no idea how Kahn feels about this). This is a very subtle exercise in weirdness. At least that's what I think.

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