"Death is a lack with weight. At the moment that you realize that someone you love is irrecoverably gone, a small tear in your life opens up. As days go by, the sliver of grief grows, becoming a rift, a gap, a gulley, a canyon. At the point that you feel lost in the immensity of space where that person used to be, the expansion stops; the hole—the vast and airy part of your life that used to be occupied by that person—becomes solid. Maybe it decreases in size, but more likely, your memories grow to occupy its space. It’s at this point that what was once nothing but lack becomes a thing with density and gravity. The loss of that person holds your body and pulls as you learn to live without them. If you meet this pressure with sadness, it will pull you into the ground. But if you can somehow feel its substance as a gift, a chance to be rooted into a deeper entanglement with life, the heft that you feel becomes an embrace with the person you’ve lost and a reminder to be present with those you can still hold close. This is what we receive when someone we love dies. 

As musicians, we can choose to address death directly or not. We can pay homage in so many ways, but simply reproducing the surface markers of what defined the person we’ve lost is not enough. We need to find something in our music that responds to the soul of our lost ones, not merely the practiced movement of fingers or the written strokes of a favorite tune. This is the difficulty we must face, and it is the payment for the gift we’ve received as the weight of our loss. A Silence Opens was initially recorded as a response to the death of trumpeter and composer Ron Miles. Ron saved my life as a young man, and his friendship and his inspiration as a musician continue to guide me. When I succeed, I can see him smiling; when I fail or am cruel, I know he wants me to do better. When he died suddenly in 2019, I openly wept on the Q train and was a zombie for months. Unexpectedly, I had lost an older brother I didn’t realize I had and a friend I’d never told how much I loved. The small tear of loss grew quickly and took forever to heal into its heaviness. The four main tunes on this disc are based on his compositions or on licks and folk music I heard him play often during the years I was lucky enough to hear him live.

After we recorded, another small tear: Susan Alcorn. This loss was fresh and how we, as a band, dealt with it was to allow ourselves to fall into the weightless chasm her passing left. I found one of her favorite pieces of protest music and followed every frantic, delicate tendril of inspiration that my grief allowed. Ryan and Ava brought their personal loss into the studio and found a way to express their own history with Susan using their unique and powerful voices. We invited her friends to come and sing. It didn’t matter if it was good. We didn’t rehearse. We just felt the joy—in saying thank you, we love you, and good bye—that Susan would have taken in seeing friends and bandmates all lined up, eyes closed, following the lines of a melody she felt in her heart. This is most likely the last Columbia Icefield record, and that is a loss, too. Over the last decade, the sound of this band has occupied my mind. Susan, Ryan, Ava, Mary Halvorson, and I have hammered out a music that I think is unique in its arc, its ambience, and its power. We’ve argued and huffed, hugged and laughed. We traveled to other continents and shot the shit in each other’s homes. This was a small family, and I think the music we made as a family was good and meaningful to me, and possibly to some other people. I mourn that loss as well.

The world of Columbia Icefield encompasses Ryan, Ava, and Mary, but it also includes Mat Maneri, Trevor Dunn, Ryan Streber, Randall Dunn, Ben Greenberg, and Owen Mulholland. Jen Mesch showed me the map of where to find this music, and David Breskin has been an important steward in helping me construct some beautiful buildings upon it. Danielle Oosterop helped us show others where to find it. I thank them all for their care and friendship in developing the life of Columbia Icefield, and I am thankful to all those that have listened to us over the years. May we always bear the weight of these losses as a gift of presence and memory." – Nate Wooley