Reliquary Grammar / 2025soundtrack and album (Celestial Excursions)
audio︎ (coming soon)
Performed and recorded by Mary Stephen (piano), Keir GoGwilt (violin), Catalina Alvarez (voice), Jack Langdon (organ), Kristopher Svensson (kacapi), David Lackner (saxophone), John Popham (cello), Anthony Vine (electric guitar, piano, harpsichord, field recordings)
Album mixed and mastered by Michael Hammond at Figure 8.
Created with the generous support of the Camargo Foundation.
I wrote the music to Reliquary Grammar in Cassis, a small port town in the Côte d'Azur. Clinging to the sea, down from softly ridged vineyards, I worked in a two-story stucco studio, cradled amongst ochre cliffs that burned bright in the sun. Inside, the walls were lined with red velvet, sourced from a defunct opera house. A vaulted ceiling of gritty pale bricks hovered over shelves of dusty LPs and tattered scores, bloated antique tables with dark benches, and a harpsichord inlaid with feathered script. At night, through the bay windows, a green luminescence shimmered in the bay windows from a lighthouse, the one from "To The Lighthouse," or so I was told.
Beckoned by the antique keyboards, I began embracing expressions of yesteryear, like baroque idioms, rustic plucking, and elegiac chanson, a music for the French parlor I found myself in. I recorded and collected my ephemeral musings at these instruments, improvisations and ideas with the raw energy of something coming into being, not quite finished or refined. I collected and preserved these moments alongside those from my time spent traveling to medieval churches. Footsteps moving across a cobblestoned nave, innocuous chant pumped through white cylindrical speakers, and bells reflecting along the passages of Arles sat alongside the sounds of Mediterranean birds, mistral winds, and foaming waves wafting through my studio windows. The archive was both historical and deeply personal, a home movie of sorts.
from Max Levin’s film ‘Reliquary Grammar’
Much of the album was recorded on my phone. From this collection of voice memos, I began auditioning tracks against one another, finding forgotten moments, making unlikely pairings and harmonic alignments, and finally braiding them into cohesive tracks. In 'Translation,' for instance, a looping idea at the piano is counterpointed with flourishes of microphone feedback, air being blown across a snail's shell, and a poem, recalling a presentation by a team of four French translators. It was read and recorded by the filmmaker Catalina Alvarez when I returned to New York. Nearly every track was composed this way: snippets from France, dreamy and fragmented, were made more real, vivid, and full through contributions from friends at home, who shone new and indispensable light on my memories.
Another friend of mine, Max Levin, took this even further, making a short film that followed the full album. He too used an archive. On a trip to Spain and Portugal, Max took camcorder footage of nature, cities, and art happenings, following his friend Nat, a poet, who carried around a bag of avant-garde books and placed them in unlikely places. Pages flap in the middle of pyramidal medians, Fluxus periodicals are spread out in the sun, books are laid in circular patterns along a staircase. The fusion of our two travel logs was so perfect I renamed the album after Max's film, Reliquary Grammar, to mark their union. The film and album remind us that material records are mere glimpses of life's multiformity and sensuousness. We cling to them, gathering and cataloguing them restlessly, as Robert Darnton says, "if only for the possibility that traces of the soul can be found in boxes in the archives."
from Max Levin’s film ‘Reliquary Grammar’