Chris Reimer - Hello People (2018)
There are things that live that are not living things. This posthumous collection, Hello People, is one such thing. Chris Reimer was a guitarist for renowned Calgary indie-rock band Women. In 2012 he suddenly passed away, at the age of 26, from heart complications. A foundation was started in his honor, supporting the arts. Canadian producer Chad VanGaalen released a fantastic tape of Reimer’s solo work, explorations into guitar-based instrumentals and ambient music, called The Chad Tape, the summer after Chris died. He’s been gone for over half a decade now. But he lives. One listens to this new collection of Reimer’s bedroom recordings, released by the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund, and one hears it. It lives. Everything dies, of course. Everything passes. But sometimes a moment is felt in a way that lasts, its echoes resounding in a way that you can’t hear the end of them. Hello People is made of such stuff, the waking dream. How can the artist be dead when the art speaks of him so purely and fully? The immediacy of music is a power, and Hello People wields that power at its height. It is here with you. It greets you. It embraces you. At once and at last, it brings you in.
And as far as guitar-based ambient bedroom records go, Hello People is pretty much peerless. It’s an all-timer, truly. Tracks like “Beneluxx,” “Arpeg,” and “Wallpaper 6” are exemplary long-form compositions, blissfully effective explorations of melodic and harmonic ideas well-worth exploring. If this was all Hello People was, it’d still be one of the better records of the year. But where this album really excels is in its shorter tracks. The transparent recording techniques and incidental found sound only heighten the impact of these sonic haikus, as they with great point and purpose immerse you in a world adjacent to your own, frozen on moments that are equally mundane and sublime, caught in amber–the everyday reduced to the essential, eternal glimpses of a hidden ecstasy and a pain that is tender but never heals.
Opener “French Death” sets quaint acoustic guitar plucks in sharp relief with a reverb swoon. It bears out its figure, it repeats, and this is all it does for its little minute and yet somehow grows in one’s mind as it does so. Enlightenment is the only true grandeur, it exhorts. Similarly, “The Lady Forgot Her Purse” has a title that evokes something trivial, but one can almost feel the observation being made, the lady forgetting her purse, and the bottom falling out, the rabbit hole yawning for us to enter, to that place where the introspective get lost for hours and sometimes days. Here, all that contained in a minute and a half, so saving us the trouble of the long journey inwards. Except that it, of course, is immediately followed by the ten hypnotic minutes of “Beneluxx.”
Harsher realities are encapsulated in tracks like “Mustard Gas” and “Malchhovish,” the former a mild case of foreboding entwined in trilling guitar lines and the latter a dirge-like fugue that feels as much an acceptance of loss as a lament of it. “Old Simple, Pt. 1” is ordered noise; “Old Simple, Pt. 2” is a plaintive chord structure in response, awash in fuzz and hiss. The record centerpiece, though, is “About,” which in name and in our digital age would seem to call to mind a tab of self-explanation, or a reveal of the content’s maker. So it is, Chris Reimer sings on “About,” the only occurrence of vocals on Hello People. But his voice and his words are obscured. They can not rise above the steady verve of the loop and Reimer’s guitar playing layered over it, a melancholy elaboration. So “About” is not so much about Reimer himself, or at least not any more than it’s about a good many things. All of those things beautiful.
Much of ambient music skirts emotion or abstracts it. Hello People is different. It digs deep into some core of an emotional experience, pushing in further and further, until the emotion is not inside us, but we exist deep within the emotion. We have passed through the tempest. We are now at the eye of the storm, wherein everything is charged with a serene clarity, even as about us we see a swirling cloud of violence and upheaval. Few records achieve what Hello People achieves with simplicity and elegance and, in essence, perfection of thought–not a note or movement misjudged, while at the same time risk and experimentation and perhaps just the blessing of being unfinished play havoc with the edges of paradise. “About” is the peak of bedroom balladry, but in the amorphous drift of its coda it is something even more than that, Reimer’s tones murmuring like a faint premonition of his own ghost. This music is meditation as something beyond the serving of the self’s well-being; it is a generous expression of that self’s beauty. Difficult to say how much the context around this record and Reimer’s passing informs one’s feeling towards it; yet, all the same, few records are this exquisitely moving and this profoundly peaceful, simultaneously.
The resonance of this effect is seen in the reactions of those it affects. It is proven in the work of those still living, lifting it up with their own lives. In the art of the artists who knew Chris Reimer, like Chad VanGaalen or the former members of Women or musicians in the Calgary music scene, or the efforts of Reimer’ own sister and the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund for these buried pieces to be brought into the light, to be heard, to live. Lives connected to the life lost, swelling up in a surge, speaking with surety, “Hello, people, here is something of great worth.” And it is testified in the wholeness of the work at hand, the flawlessness, the shocking seamlessness with which this album flows out and into you, and you will never really understand the fact that this is a collection of rough drafts that might not have been intended to be shared and which were not assembled together by the artist but by people who are simply trying to honor him. Because that fact does not speak the truth. The truth is that this is Chris Reimer’s masterpiece, lovingly given to us by those who loved him. The truth is that it is complete and right and exactly as it should be. And the truth is that it lives.
You can almost picture Reimer “Waving Goodbye From a Tree.” The notes struck from his guitar hang off branches silhouetted into black against a blurred backdrop of sun-glint sea ripples that’s like a shivering curtain of light–an image brought to mind by the final shot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s last opus before his death, Offret. …Percussion enters. The song goes on. It is only 3 minutes. It goes on. The instruments cascade and climax. It goes on. Reimer’s no longer in that tree. The song is done, but it goes on. You can still hear it. You feel its memory like it is the present; you think about the people who have shared in it. There again and forever is Reimer, waving goodbye from a tree, against a backdrop of this mortal earth made celestial by the way the artist makes you see it, by this parting grace by which Chris Reimer makes himself known. Death is an end, but it is not the end. As long as art such as Hello People exists, we can do more than hope this. We can do more than know it. We can feel it.
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