From time to time I’m stricken with a wash of early-onset nostalgia—a veneration of the past, however recent, and a heightened state of meaning associated with the little sensory snapshots that make up my history. As an animating force of interior life, this kind of reminiscence lends a vibrancy to the narratives that I tell and retell to myself. The romance of all these buried sensations is inextricably bound up in music. Only certain songs carry the particular spell necessary to conjure the fleetingly beautiful. It has to be the kind of music you can get tangled in, the richness of the tones coming to stand in for fragile sensations that only those same songs can later invoke. Ghost Orchard, Sam Hall’s cassette project out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, taps into a rich vein of this yearning. On April 2016’s Bliss, Hall marries rasping double-tracked acoustics to pop tempos and melancholy keys, all lovingly laid on a bed of warm static, seemingly crafted to summon pasts both real and imagined.
Released by Orchid Tapes, Warren Hildebrand’s New York-based cassette label, Bliss is Ghost Orchard’s third album. Jim Sullivan and Tyler Moore provided backing drums, while Hall played the rest of the instrumentation. Its thirteen songs all share short running times (rarely ranging beyond three minutes) and a pervasive, restless sense of chagrin—heavily nostalgic, but never descending into sepia-toned cliché. There’s a humility here, and from that comes a sense of uninfringeable honesty. Album opener “Lavender” leaps in with warbling keyboards and vocals that straddle the mournful and the laconic. “Open the blinds / artificial light,” sings Hall, and it does seem like we’ve opened a window and cast light on his quiet, private wanting. Loping pulses of melody, as on “Separate” and “I Saw You Floating,” repeat, mantra-like, until the listener is gradually transported to a space where their own dreamy recollections arise and are grafted to the music. “4th of July,” fast-moving and draped with regret, turns the holiday celebration inwards on itself, retooled into a meditation on distance. And the static clears, at least partially, for “October 2013,” an autumnal ode to a love and a time that was gentle yet marked by loss. On this track and the album as a whole, Hall eschews the dramatic, painting distance as less devastating than it is wistful.
The songs on Bliss seem like they’ve retroactively inserted themselves into my past. It feels as though I heard them long ago, and they now recall to me things that never happened. Steeped in tape hiss, the creak and crackle of the eight-track, and all those mainstays of lo-fi bedroom recording, Hall’s songs are never overextended, existing only as a fragmentary catalogue of feelings filed away. Each seems to refer, like an index, to a singular, pinpointed memory: rainy days or school days or days of unfulfilled wanting.
On “Sin,” the album’s final track, Hall sings, “Sleeping for infinity / Pain lacing in memory / Forgive all you gave to me / Blessed living sincerity / Blissful static; blissful sin.” Maybe as our sins are shrunk by time, we can find in them some sense of contentment—contentment with our youthful mistakes, with the pain laced in our memories, and an acceptance that our pasts will always be filled with hiss and static, indefinite and obscured and rough around the edges, and no less beautiful for it.
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