Seeing the beauty of blue: Elori Saxl on memory, music and solitude
By Trever Hagen
How we remember is an unforgiving set of steps. Unforgiving in that where those steps lead is not always where we want to go. An elderly man closes his eyes to picture in his mind’s eye an event from decades ago. Friends put on a tune to remember an absent friend. Families put up gravestones to house the spirits of the dead. Communities put up statues. Take down statues.
We sit in the present and dance between remembering and forgetting, trying to understand how the past might fit into the future. Books are read on the power of the present moment, yet we cannot help but then document that moment with a photo or a video or a post; info that is presumably to be used for our future selves to remember. A constant public memory project that is built up through likes, shares, pixels, and wav files. One has to pause and wonder where our culture of digital documentation – of both the iconic and the mundane – is taking us. Or rather what does our desire to document and remember show us about what it is to be human?
Composer Elori Saxl’s The Blue of Distance untangles these complex webs that memory, self and technology evoke: a mediated experience of the past. Photos laid out on a bedroom floor, a reference to things that are no more. A past that is remarkably more close yet increasingly foreign. A nostalgia that can live you stricken with the simple truth that time is the only real scarce resource.
Saxl’s process of making the piece traveled along that nostalgic journey that mediated memories make possible – a journey that can be, well, blue. But Saxl’s process decidedly embraced the beauty of that blue. Bathed in that blue-ness of longing, buttressed by mnemonic devices, Elori came out on the other side with a bit of a changed perspective on how to receive nostalgia.
Saxl began to write the piece in the Adirondack mountains in New York during a summer season, surrounded by flowing water and the peace of the forest. After a short break with the music, she found herself on Madeline Island surrounded by a frigid Lake Superior, as well as in a new environment and a new life situation. Ready to complete the music she had started in the summer, she began to look back at videos from that time. As Saxl describes, “It started as a meditation on the effect of technology on our relationship with land/nature/place but ultimately evolved to be more of a reflection on longing and memory. “
The Blue of Distance combines digitally-processed recordings of wind and water with electronic synthesizers and chamber orchestra. Blending this multisensory effect, we are left wondering about how moods and atmospheres can be touchstones to the past. Aesthetic triggers for bringing back the past. But to which past and what version of truth of that past? To cling and long is a way of suffering, and sometimes it seems worth it.
Saxl and I chatted over the phone during last days of 2020 about her upcoming video premiere of Beyond Blue from The Blue of Distance at the Great Northern Festival on February 1, 2021.
T: How did this album evolve from the Adirondack mountains to the quarantine culture of the COVID 19 pandemic?
E: I actually wrote all of the music a few years ago, so it had nothing to do with the pandemic. But it’s definitely taken on a different tone now. The process was: I wrote the first three tracks in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York in the middle of summer and then took a long pause of many months for other work. When I returned to it, I was on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, and it was the middle of winter. The environment was different, and emotionally I was also in a pretty different place, but I really wanted to finish the project and make it sound cohesive. I had all of these photos and videos [from the summer], and I’d just stare at them for a long time and listen to the first tracks and try to get into the headspace and recreate that original feeling of being in the lush summer mountains. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. But that was an interesting experience to witness firsthand how impossible it is to truly re-visit an experience of a place — that even when we have photos and videos of people and places and we can visit them in some ways — the actual experience is never achieved.
T: Do you feel like people are trying to hold on or capture the present moment to an excess?
E: : Yeah definitely. It feels like a lot of advancements in technology are about trying to get better at capturing or representing a person or a place. There are certainly things of value there, but the danger zone is when we start believing that they are a replacement for the real experience or that they are true representations.
“As a person, I think my pitfall will always be melancholy, but this process helped me understand that that can be a kind of power.”
T: The music lends itself to these private levels of remembering or forgetting. There are so many cultural cues or scripts that ask us to downplay these moments rather than recognizing them and being with them. This process of revisiting mediated memories sounds very difficult — attempting to return to a blissful place. It sounds almost agony-inducing? Did a painful memory become more of a voice in the piece as a result?
E: I think that the title addresses this. Yeah, there was a long period when I was working on the album of feeling total agony and just being filled with melancholy. At some point in that period, I read A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. In the book, she has a chapter called “The blue of distance” in which she refers to the idea that mountains in the distance appear blue because certain light particles get lost over distance and only the blue reaches us. But when we get closer to the mountains, we see that they are not actually blue. The distance creates the beautiful color. For me, reading that was a total light bulb moment: Oh I don’t need to close this gap and fix the longing, and I don’t need to get back there. I can actually just sit in the longing and embrace it and feel its shape and feel it as its own beautiful thing. As a person, I think my pitfall will always be melancholy, but this process helped me understand that that can be a kind of power.
T: How did you come to work with choreographer Emma Portner on the video? Did you work closely?
E: It was a bit crazy how our collaboration unfolded. When I began writing this music, I was unsure if I even wanted to make a record because I wasn’t sure if I felt like this type of music needed to exist on its own. But I knew that I liked this kind of music paired with film or dance and that I wanted to work with filmmakers and choreographers in the future, so I figured I’d make an album so that I had something that I could send to people that I wanted to work with. That was the thing that kept me going when I wanted to quit. Emma was at the top of that list, but I kind of thought that, you know, life is long, and maybe we’ll find each other at some point. Then the day that I finished the record, she posted something like “looking for a composer. Contact me if interested.” I sent her the record, and we started talking about working together pretty immediately after that. It felt pretty magical. Originally, she was going to make a short dance film and use The Blue of Distance as the score. For various reasons, it never ended up coming out, and for about a year the collaboration was on hold. Then I reached out over the summer to see if she wanted to make a music video for the album, but with Covid, everything was just too impossible to figure out. I kind of laid to rest the idea of collaborating. And then about a month later, I got an email from her with a download of all of the footage she had shot for the original short film. I started trying to edit it to my music and found that even though she had filmed the choreography in silence, everything lined up almost perfectly. There was a ton of footage, but I ended up picking the parts that felt like they kept the focus on the choreography. Both dancers, Justin and Emma, are so amazing, and I really wanted to keep the focus on them. With the video that will be projected, Before Blue — I really love all the minor adjustments in Justin’s movement. It reminds me of how people online will tweak, delete, and adjust themselves.
T: You are on Madeline now, correct? How are you surviving?
E: Yep! I got up here in early March by total coincidence right before the pandemic started. My family has a place here, and I’ve tried to spend a month or two here every winter the last few years. I’d come for my usual winter stay, but two weeks after getting here, everything shut down, and I haven’t left yet! I thought I’d hit a wall, but honestly I am in no way at all sick of it and have actually just grown to love it more. I’ve always loved the natural part about being here. But I guess the thing that was a surprise, considering Covid, is how much being part of the community here has meant to me. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I’m really enjoying being here now.
T: How did you deal with that Lake?
E: It’s crazy. It changes every day, and the sky changes every day. Every day I’m like wow, I’ve never seen that style of sunset before and then the next day it is an even different style. To have the experience to look out at an expanse like that is very special — unlike anywhere else in the continental US. I’m working on some music right now that is a reflection on, or thinking about, the Lake itself and this past year.
T: How often do you leave the island?
E: Once every 4-6 weeks for groceries. In the summer, there’s a lot of stuff that grows here both in the woods and in gardens, and you can get eggs. But I guess in general I’ve just become better at knowing how to freeze and keep things longer.
By Greg Wikstrom
T: Do you feel New York is calling you back at all?
E: Absolutely not. (Laugh) There are certainly things I miss for sure, but no. Not anytime soon. I’m not done with it, but my relationship to it is changing. I really appreciate the massive growth I had there, and you know just being constantly pummeled seems to have shaped me for the better. But it is a hard place for me. What this year solidified for me was that I want to be left alone about six days a week and to have time and space to work and go outside. One day a week I do want to see friends, but most of the time I just want space. So that has been interesting to think about what is a healthy and productive work environment for myself.
T: Does Minneapolis have that kind of breath for you?
E: Yes it does. I’ve been asking myself that ever since leaving here after high school. I remember getting stuck in the snow in an intersection once in Uptown. Within 30 seconds, two cars pulled up to help, then another guy came out with a 6-pack. I feel like there is a pride of getting through it but then also a culture around that strength that’s so much more. I was talking to someone from Montreal and I was realizing how much of the music I like is from Montreal, Scandinavia, Iceland–places very far north. I guess maybe I identify with people who keep their cards close. Not quite as ostentatious. But yeah, it seems like something very good for creativity happens when you have a long period of winter.
T: Were you a fan of the winter growing up here?
E: I loved it. As an adult, why I love it has maybe become more complex. But as a kid I played hockey, snowboarded.
T: You went deep.
E: I went deep.
The Great Northern Festival will premiere Saxl’s video for Before Blue from her album The Blue of Distance (Western Vinyl). The piece is filmed and choreographed by Emma Portner and performed by Justin De Jager. The video will premiere on The Great Northern website along with a large-scale rendering of the video projected onto the exterior of the Cowles Center for Dance in downtown Minneapolis February 1, 6-8pm (on loop). Visitors can stream the music (Before Blue) on their own devices as they watch the projected visuals.