Dolphin Midwives Shares the Stories Behind Her Spellbinding New Album Liminal Garden
II. Junglespell
Tropical leaves unfurling, competing for sunlight, the tangled interwoven lush saturated jungle plant interspecies communication, the continual destruction rebirth and transformation of nature, many rhythms and life cycles simultaneous, ineracting, enhancing and competing with each other.
While there’s little more than a harp at the heart of Sage Fisher’s Dolphin Midwives songs, it’s easy to fall under her spell of processed and pure sound, as vocal and string melodies are mangled and massaged before our very eyes.
“The first time that I saw Dolphin Midwives,” says Beacon Sound founder Andrew Neerman, “Sage was a spectral presence, dressed all in white, as though prepared for some sort of purification ritual. The way that she conjured up a web of sound that managed to be both jarring and trance-inducing—with just a harp, her voice, and a bunch of pedals—was memorable. She has since proven herself to be one of the hardest-working musicians in Portland.”
Fisher’s strongest artistic statement yet hit shops last week in the form of her Liminal Garden LP, a co-release between Beacon Sound and Sounds et al. In the following exclusive, Fisher shares the record in full along with a complete track-by-track commentary that puts its overarching themes in perspective…
.Liminal Garden is about change—transforming myself and the world, disappearing, shifting perspectives, the relationship between nature and modern technology, the struggle and constant mutation required to be femme living in a patriarchy. This album changed as I made it, and it changed me. During the making of this record, my life underwent a dramatic series of upheavals. The big eclipse happened, I moved, I went through a break up, I banished a shadowy character from my past, I changed jobs, #metoo happened, and I was suddenly deeply aware I was sharing this huge unearthed trauma with the women of the world. And while this was happening, I was developing this series of rhythmic jazz and gamelan-inspired harp songs, songs that were about the ecstasy of the natural world and diversity and the vitality of plant life. Fast and fluttery and interlocking rhythms and bold was the plan. But as everything shook up in my world, the pieces wanted to become lighter, airier, spacier; I became vulnerable and the work became full of holes, spaces, disappearances. It really reflects how I felt during the process, like I was disappearing and reappearing every other millisecond, somehow living out another life in another universe. I was doing my best to heal from trauma while remaining present, still allowing myself sweetness and empathy and beauty, while experiencing unyielding heart pain, and attempting to share some of this lightness, hope and vulnerability with the world.The result is Liminal Garden.
The name of the project and the lushness of the album might cause one to assume that Dolphin Midwives is a large electronic ensemble. Instead Dolphin Midwives is the alias of multi-instrumentalist and composer Sage Fisher, perhaps best known for her harp but similarly proficient in zither, guitar, voice and electronics. In prior releases she’s also collaborated with a gamelan orchestra and…
