Ka Baird entered 2022 feeling adrift. The two years of lockdowns and shutdowns have been difficult for the artist, whose practice – an improvisational fusion of wordless vocalizations, movement and electronic percussion – is deeply dependent on the intimacy of live performance. At Chicago's Lampo Foundation, they developed a new solo piece, Ball bearing, which will be performed 10 times over two evenings that spring, for audiences of between one and four people. Pacing the stage, deploying disorienting changes in lighting and sound design, alternating flute bursts and ghostly whistling and chatter, Baird hoped to evoke a mixture of confusion and catharsis—the kind of soul-cleansing experience that might signal a new beginning. , helping artist and audience find their bearings in a world that's getting weird. Then, a few weeks before the show began, Baird's mother experienced an unexpected decline in her health. the diagnosis was definitive.
Byrd stepped forward Ball bearing—the final performance is punctuated, frankly, by a fireworks display visible from the venue's windows. After the shows, they retired to Decatur, Illinois, where, along with their brother, they spent the next six months caring for their mother. While sleeping, Baird worked on the music. On September 1, Karen Faye Lepp Baird died at the age of 79 in the arms of her children, taking her last breath as the sun set. The loss inspired Baird to become one doula at the end of life and also shaped their new album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, helping to channel the cathartic intensity of Lampo performances into an unpredictable, electric form. Baird's music often feels like a metaphorical transmission from another realm. With Ball bearingthey push forward into the rift.
The album's organizing principle is the bardo, which Tibetan Buddhism understands as a gateway, like those the dying pass through on their way from life to rebirth. “We're always in a bardo,” Baird writes in the album's liner notes, “because transience never takes a break.” The title of the album's 11 tracks, from “Gate I” to “Gate XI”, suggests a series of doors, however Ball bearing it looks less like a collection of discrete pieces than like an ever-unfolding chain of events—a single stream of energy, twisting and contorting and forever taking new shapes.
The album begins with a low, humming haloed hum and puffy puff, and ends with a similar drone that sounds exactly one interval higher – as if the idea of ascent was encoded directly into the music's frequencies. Between these books, Baird uses many of the same techniques that stood out in 2019 He breathes. Their voice sounds more animal than human – hiss, growl, grunt, scream. Electronic signals pulse in waves, like anxious ringtones. atonal bursts of flute buffeted by long, flat stretches of voiceless song, like gusts of wind hitting plate glass. The occasional tinkle of trumpet or plucked viola serves as one of many recurring patterns, like signposts on the soul's journey. The force that holds it all together is the tension between flow and stillness – a restless give-and-take marked by percussive upheavals and sudden moments of silence. The only lyrics are a repeated chorus of “Here, disappear, poof,” yet even those words are indistinguishable from a wizard's smoke bomb.
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ka-baird-bearings-soundtracks-for-the-bardos