Cory Smythe

"I imagined the four ensemble pieces that begin this album as belonging to the repertoire of a speculative musical culture — one potentially not so far removed from my own — whose sonic and lyrical affinities reflect chronic, hazardous inundation, and mystifying betrayal. Without my realizing it at first, they became, in their own way, more-or-less oblique renditions of the Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach standard “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief into sound, its titular metaphor for desire, delusion, and disaster spilling out in shapely ringlets of billowing melody.

I found myself returning to this song a few months later, when “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” — or some semblance of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”: a swirling, spiraling vocality, a kind of sonic deceit and disappearance, a fluidic memorial to acrid, heartbreaking loss — gradually began to seep into and overwhelm the work I’d been doing at the piano. That work — an attempt to more fully understand, undermine, and add to the piano’s resources of sound with extensions of concealed computerized origin — grew steadily into a multi-panel painting: Puffs of wood and string pouring out of the still-smoldering ruin of a piano; and some future listener, perhaps, for whom that dark, vanishing fog might yet convey a love song." - Cory Smythe