Juni Habel 'Carvings' (Basin Rock)
Summer's coming. So why does this mournful magic from Winter refuse to let me go?
The internet enables us to find out as much as we want about what we like. It also enables us, if we’re careful, to find out as little as we want. I know Juni Habel lives with her family in old converted schoolhouse in the tiny village of Rakkestad in the rural hinterland of Norway some way south of Oslo. I know some of her family appear on ‘Carvings’.
And that’s all I want to know. Even that is perhaps too much. It’s telling to me how I warmed to this album (although warmed is perhaps the wrong word - it’s more like my body temperature empathetically cooling to this record) even more when I realised Habel is not an American. In as much as where you’re from ever mattering more than where you’re AT, my only prevarication about ‘Carvings’, which has bewitched me entirely ever since I first heard it in early Spring, was that this was ‘another’ American singer-songwriter in thrall to Joni. I can think of no-one better to be in thrall to, and I love Marina Allen . . . which made me more keen to give this a pass, but after a couple of listens, when I noticed how drawn back to ‘Carvings’ I was becoming, a pass wasn’t needed and referents (which I’m sure only reveal the shocking patriarchal nature of our listening, that when a woman sings on acoustic guitar your mind flies to Joni every time) were out the window, lost in the slipstream, flowing out to the ocean. ‘Carvings’ is too good to be drawn around or safely filed (filing so often equates to a kind of forgetting, a fending off).
You can find out more about Juni. But I would suggest the first thing you find out about Juni is her music on this wonderful record. The first track ‘Rhythm Of The Tides’ emerges from a peal of ambient sound, even momentarily, highly reminiscent of Joanna Brouk’s ‘Sound Of The Sea’ tape from 1980 (do check out the recent reissue of this on Numero Group) then settles into a minor key pulse. And in comes Habel’s voice
As I walk to the door, black water holds me
So what we have is a voice and an acoustic guitar, and the faintest hint of a zither and a harmonium, and there’s so many ways in which that can be the wrong thing to hear right now, so many people have corrupted such formulations by their insistence that this kind of wood’n’wire ‘purity’ is somehow more authentic, more real, ‘matters’ more than the flash of modern pop. That condescencion towards the small scale that doesn’t realise how infinite a room can be, and how tiny the world. I hear none of that agrarian yearning in this music, I hear neither the rural nor the civic but the headspace of Habel which seems to tightrope between the two, crucially I hear not a trace of nostalgia and my god it’s SO important that I don’t. Juni Habel arranges her stunning songs with an eye totally aware of pop confection, and the subtle ways that the best way of treating acoustic sources is entirely without reverence, and with an ear for accident and how accidents make hooks and hooks get inside us. So her songs, like Leonard Cohen’s, grow from these ‘simple’ roots into things of palatial wonder, as confected - and confounding, and moving - as the most painstaking pop. ‘Carvings’ is not just a capturing of songs, it is a rendering of songs as acts not just of heart but imagination and pop vision. And so as ‘Tides’ bleeds away into a multivoiced chorale of wintry desolation, Habel radiophonically blends icey soundwaves around her voice, ends the song in fact on a mirror image of the plangent noise that began it. Often on ‘Carvings’ you feel like you’ve stumbled across some strange radio broadcast from between destinations on your AM dial, an abandoned numbers station in which a new, perhaps ancient, voice has come a-haunting. A billion lightyears from anything that could be summoned at an open-mic night. Unless that mic was sensitive to the background radiation of the universe.
So this music draws you in, is convivial in that you’re let into Habel’s home and you hear her family sing as on ‘I Went Out And Sought Your Name’. It’s so intensely gratifying when the songs starts in the same minor-key space as the first song - you immediately get a sense that Habel has no interest in proving a ‘variety’ here, is engaged with a focus and mild monomania that’s immensely more moving than any Powerpoint-style presentation of her abilities could be. But even if the song’s title and lyrics
how I hoped to see it again, descended unscented flowers . . . watch the dawn before it breaks, with all it takes we dressed up for winter, the cold will take us and leave us crystallised, find me my darling with a face to the ground
say you’re in on this, part of this - you are not gently introduced to this music’s rhythms, the way the songs seem to emerge from the dust-motes and cloisters of her home to weave themselves into Habel’s day-to-day - you simply bear witness, observe, (‘look around you . . . look again’ sings Habel, and you wonder if a fourth or fifth wall has been broken) as both outsider to the process but insider on the emotion, wondering whether you yourself are in fact here in substance or merely in spirit, whether you might be able to walk through the walls of this sound out into the night. The way the song ends, this haunting hint of strings, this line that seems to ask who both we and Habel are, and how the hell we know each other . . this is more than mere careful craft, it’s the bravery of careless magic. ‘Little Twirl’ which follows is reminscent of Big Thief at their sparsest and loveliest, Habel harmonising on herself with a restraint and austerity that makes the one-shot chorus leave fletchettes of warmth in your heart. ‘Valiant’ is the sparsest song here, deliberately given no rhthym bar the gauzy abstraction of Habel’s right hand on her guitar, all tumbles and slips between reveries.
”When We Wake” is the longest song here and forms a highlight and centrepoint - you’re reminded by the sighing strings of its intro of Hugo Largo and ‘Odyshape’s most bewitching moments - the way Habel leaves passages of music unpopulated by her voice, blends in little spirals of piano that set up their own miniature drones, multitracks her voice into the flow, swelling together like streams and rivers to the big wide estuary depths of the coda means its seven minutes seem too short. The wider world is only acknowledged in Habel’s songs as a natural phenomenon she is witness to, that colours and contains her vision - the heart of the record is this dialogue that ‘When We Wake’ seems to bring to a telepathic height. These are the intimate nods and assents and barriers of a friendship, a true hopeless love. ‘Chicory’ brings the only moment in which I think Habel is close to making an explicit homage - again Big Thief recalled in the verses filled with space and cuckoos, but the chorus is so close to Linda Perhacs ‘Chimicum Rain’ (and the phonetic adjacency of ‘Chicory’ and ‘Chimicum’ is surely no accident) it’s uncanny, but it feels unforced, there to be noticed if you’re feeling smart-arsey, a magical coincidence perhaps more than an intended nod of the head. And like much music made in lockdown it feels like a reach for something as a reminder of hope, a reminder that ‘life can be so good’ even if from the vantage point of a soul batting away daily torment. ‘Drifting Pounds Of The Train’ is another simply gorgeous tune which Habel has the smarts to smear with texture and suggestive detail - whorls of reversed violins that cinematically, simultaneously, draw you so close to Habel it’s like you have a shared heartbeat, but also pull you away to a drone-shot from a hundred feet above her, as she walks through wherever you imagine her to be. I know I should be thinking of Nordic forests, snow, all that suggestive and reductive iconography my damn fool insistence of finding out about Habel threw around my listening, but as a city boy this can still be used as city music - by which i mean music for city dwellers who need to feed their lonely steps are accompanied by another soul. ‘I Carry You My Love’ closes ‘Carvings’ out with the simplest arrangement on the record - acoustic, voice(s) pushed to the front of the mix with a new onward-looking starkness, the twin-Habels ultimately creeping you out a little with their refusal to hide, with their plainsong closeness. If you set your device up right, at this point, the opening peal of ‘Rhythm Of The Tides’ will return. And you genuinely look right and left for an exit, knowing that the thing your body and mind WANTS to do is let it play again. I can not suggest a single reason why you wouldn’t, because ‘Carvings’ is truly an album to get lost in, to let in to your place and space and let it entirely suffuse you with Habel’s vision. One of my favourite records thus far in 2023.