Tip! *2023 stock* "Where Tremble Heart is an album of distances. Distances crossed and uncrossed. Entanglements time-traveled. Embodied and speculated spaces. Letters cast and undone. John and I met in Tucson, Arizona in late summer 2019, and quickly developed a highly collaborative friendship. While we didn’t meet until our late 30s, a humorous and provoking caveat is that John and I spent our early youth in small, farming towns in western Kansas, less than an hour away from each other. Distances traversed and double under, overlap. Magnetism is a perplexing feeling. 

This magnetic album was made far and away from one another’s presence. Or at least each other’s physical body. Generally, John lives part time (and over the last two years, full time) in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I have been living in central Tucson the last few years. I must confess I have struggled with the idea of making an album with others “at a distance”. Sharing files remotely and working out-of-sync can often complicate or draw out a creative project in an unwieldy way. Momentum dissipates, energies dissolve, expectations fall out of alignment. The back and forth can even ruin the endeavor that those involved wished to share between each other. 

There are two CDs here with many threads knotted and unknotted. The first CD has three compositions. The first two tracks are our distanced gathering and shaping of sound. A lettrist folding of inhabited bodies and slowed down thoughts. The third track is a live session from Exploded View, a cinema and art space in downtown Tucson. This track was recorded in mid August 2021, one afternoon during a three day trip John took to Tucson. I imagine that the live recording is akin to us catching up after a couple years of writing back and forth. No pondering, just conversing. The second CD contains four field recordings. Two of them are taken from the thunder filled, monsoon rains of Tucson and two of them from the pulsing waves of Cape Breton. I now wonder which CD is the deconstruction of material and which one is the unification of form." - Cecyl Ruehlen