Good morning.

Today we’re listening to Elori Saxl, an American ambient composer from the midwest. We previously recommended her music back in 2022. She grew up between Madeline Island and Minneapolis, and studied violin and drums in her youth, as she told zensounds with Stephan Kunze in a recent interview. Her latest album, Drifts and Surfaces, is inspired by her residence on Lake Superior, and reflects life in that environment through processed percussion and violin, as she explains below. We’re also playing Saxl’s debut LP, The Blue of Distance, a meditative ambient record that creatively loops violin and synth. A conversation with Elori follows the streaming links.

Drifts and Surfaces - Elori Saxl (20m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

The Blue of Distance - Elori Saxl (40m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

What are your earliest memories of music?

Playing open string cycle in group violin lessons age 3.

Who are the artists whose music awakened you to the wonderful world of ambient and instrumental electronic music?

To be totally honest, I didn’t really know about the ambient world until I put out my first record and people started asking me about it. I was trying to make classical music but listening to a lot of dance music, and it got a bit jumbled on the way out. Steve Reich inspired a lot of my early ideas for sample processing, phasing, and combining orchestral instrumentation with pre-recorded material. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s album Ears really opened a door in my brain in terms of thinking about ways to combine electronics and acoustic instruments. Arthur Russell, Mica Levi, and Oliver Coates have inspired a lot of specific textures.

On Drifts and Surfaces, you channel the experience of living on Lake Superior into music. Tell us about the sonic effects that reflect that experience.

Madeline Island is very far north, almost in Canada, and the water that surrounds it is deathly cold–9 months of the year you can die in a few minutes if you fall in. The island is the last land mass before hundreds of miles of endless lake, so when you go out into the water and get far enough away from the island that you can’t see it and the waves get bigger and the fog comes in, it can become really difficult to tell not just east from west but also up from down. You lose the horizon and in turn lose all sense of direction and self. Living there, there’s this understanding that yes, nature is magical, beautiful, and awe-inspiring, but it is also dark and mysterious and powerful and dangerous and doesn’t care about you and can subsume you. I think I was trying to capture that sense of disappearing horizon, lostness, awe, and dark power that feels really innate to Lake Superior. Musically, I was trying to do this through: synthesizing lots of tiny percussion hits that coalesce to become big cohesive waves, processing through distortion, compression, saturation, and various forms of deterioration to where the material starts to fall apart. The lake is also constantly changing–drifts change directions, water becomes ice, ice breaks apart and becomes waves. There is constant movement from drifts to surfaces, surfaces to drifts.

Many of the tracks on Drifts and Surfaces have this rapid oscillation effect, almost like they're vibrating – how did you achieve that?

There are actually no synths per se on the album. With “Drifts I” and “Drifts II,” I’m digitally processing a recording of Matt Evans playing a drum roll on a snare drum to create all of the sounds. The two pieces use two different snare drum processing techniques, sort of like two sides of the same coin, but both pieces are built from the same 10 second sample. The vibrating sound is the sound of a drum roll. In “Surfaces,” I’m digitally processing myself playing violin. I’m using a lot of processes usually applied to vocals, but pushing them to the computer’s limit until the sample interpolation starts getting a little messed up and glitchy. 

"Surfaces" was commissioned by the Guggenheim as part of their 2022 Alex Katz retrospective. Tell us what your favorite Katz painting is and how your music reflects his work.

I’m definitely no expert on Katz! But I really enjoyed doing the deep dive on him and his work for the Guggenheim show. “Surfaces” was commissioned to be played in the first gallery of the exhibit (the high gallery), which had three large paintings in it: Golden Image, West 2, and Grey Landscape. So I was responding mostly to those three paintings, all of which deal with fleeting moments of perception, changing and fading light, and the moment at which the delineation between objects starts to blur or our perception of the shape of something changes. My experience seeing these paintings in the gallery was also that after some time with them, some detail would suddenly jump out to me as if there was movement within the painting. So I wanted to create a piece that mirrored this sense of movement hidden within stillness. Also, normally I think about music as a time-based medium that progresses linearly. But with “Surfaces,” the challenge was to create a piece for a static viewing experience in a room that didn’t need to be listened to in time. I wanted to create something that didn’t overshadow Katz’s work or dictate a certain feeling but rather provided space to make it your own with just enough small details that could come out if you chose to focus on them but didn’t demand your attention.

Many of Katz’s other pieces in the exhibition also included lots of other people in his community–family, other artists, composers, dancers, etc. It’s a real who’s who of the NYC scene across many years. So that really got me thinking about how there’s no “I” as an artist without both the artists who came before me and the artists I’ve grown alongside in my little music community. All those people really keep me going. I wanted to really overtly nod to the influence those people have on me, so included a few friends (Henry Solomon on baritone saxophone and Robby Bowen on glass marimba) and the deep influence Arthur Russell’s work has had on me (through the string production). And at the same time, I have this understanding that at some point in order to do deep work I have to turn inwards, and there can be a real sense of loneliness to that. So that tension is what I was trying to capture. 

Do you listen to music while doing busywork, like answering emails? If so what are your go-tos?

Ha, that’s a great question. Yes I often do. Some current go-tos: Alabaster De Plume’s To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, Amancio D'silva’s Sapana, Jeff Parker’s Forfolks, Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach’s Spiorachas - A High Place. And my friend Matt Evans has an unreleased album he just sent me that I’ve been listening to a lot.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

Ohyung. Best live show.

What are you working on next?

There’s a bunch of different things brewing that i’m all very excited about. Some scores, some collaborative music leaning into improvisation, and some more beat-driven stuff. In general feeling excited about widening the cracks and digging into the dirt. Keeping things looser and leaving space for something else to enter.