Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose – Bridge Carols

Contributor: Ed Thanhouser

Laura Gibson and Ethan Rose’s hotly-anticipated collaborative album is officially out in the world, after long gestation. We first got a taste last summer, when the duo contributed “Sun” to the 2009 PDX Pop Now! compilation. In it, Gibson intones, “Sometimes I melt away / into a puddle of light…” just as her voice does exactly that amidst an airy expanse of tinkling chimes and cumulo-nimbus harp chords, all washed in a gently shimmering reverb. It was a perfect choice to represent the project. Throughout the course of Bridge Carol’s 8 tracks, you may be suddenly overcome by the feeling of being bathed in warm light, lifted up, transported. This is transcendental, out-of-body music.

Composed from leftover, “homeless” vocal fragments Gibson had lying around in old notebooks,  the CD insert tells us that Rose “…took the recorded words and vocalizations from these sessions – cutting them into bits and pieces – rearranging and juxtaposing them against each other to stretch them into new musical poems.”  Poems- It’s an apt word for these compositions. They are most definitely not “songs” in the traditional sense, and are even further removed from the previous work of either artist. Rather, like a poem, they are a kind of centripetal world: artificial, sealed, immaculate. Appropriately enough, Gibson’s “vocalizations” feel more free-verse than lyric. When on “Leaving Believing,” she chants the track’s title over and over, it’s much like Stein’s infamous “rose is a rose,” where the sonorous repetition of words is an end in itself.

Formless, though meticulously constructed, Bridge Carols is remarkable in that it feels both effortless and completely lucid. I must admit to being rather impressed. After all, what is it that separates the beautiful ebb and swell of these songscapes from the vast piles innocuous elevator junk? “Form-free sound-scapes and vocal collage” …it sounds like something you’d play in a yoga studio or massage parlor between whalesong and Enya. Yet, in spite of its genre, Bridge Carols is neither pretentious nor obnoxious. Rather, Gibson and Rose have produced an album that would be not at all inappropriate to hear as you approach the great pearly gates of the afterlife.