Shortly after Adrianne Lenker’s arrival onstage at Portland’s Revolution Corridor, the viewers’s anticipatory silence turns giddy, breaking into heat laughter that wafts throughout the room like a rustling breeze. “Some actually good giggles happening,” she says winkingly. “All I did is stroll on.” Recorded over three nights and brimming with 43 tracks, Dwell at Revolution Corridor is stitched via with such intimate moments. Surrounding reside performances are soundchecks, joyous greetings from attendees, appearances from Lenker’s canine Oso, and nostalgic exchanges with buddies. In a single snippet, Lenker begins plucking “Now Westlin Winds,” a ballad by Scottish people singer Dick Gaughan based mostly on Robert Burns’ “Composed in August,” on her guitar. She declares she will be able to’t sing it, then proceeds to recite every verse in full, elevating her voice at one level to compete with a motorbike’s hapless roar. The result’s a vivid archive not simply of time but in addition of area—the ephemera orbiting any formal reside efficiency.
Area has grow to be a rising fixture in Lenker’s music, in each her work because the clear-eyed lodestar of the folks rock band Huge Thief and as a solo artist. She recorded 2020’s songs/instrumentals straight to tape in a distant western Massachusetts cabin as a result of it reminded her of “the within of an acoustic guitar.” The same course of adopted for 2024’s Vivid Future, the place a coterie of collaborators joined her in chasing every track’s unfolding in an environment of immediacy. (Two of them, alt-R&B artist Nick Hakim and violinist Josefin Runsteen, accompany Lenker for almost all of Dwell at Revolution Corridor.) Within the celestial physique of Lenker’s music, songs are flickering situations slightly than any form of mounted level.
On Dwell at Revolution Corridor, Lenker partnered together with her long-time pal and collaborator, Andrew Sarlo, who refracts these three Portland nights via three completely different recording codecs. Working as a modern-day Alan Lomax, Sarlo used a handheld cassette recorder, a four-channel cassette recorder, and a reel-to-reel tape machine to maneuver listeners round: from soundcheck to reside efficiency, from again of the corridor to entrance, from personal moments to public ones. “promise is a pendulum,” off Huge Thief’s Dragon New Heat Mountain I Imagine In You, begins at observe, crackling with lo-fi ambiance as if Lenker had been within the Nineteen Twenties auditioning for Ralph Peer, then abruptly, seamlessly, offers option to the saturated reside model—all luminous colour. Essentially the most beguiling of those transitions happens on “something,” which shifts 4 instances, widening the view to encapsulate the viewers’s sing-along, then narrowing it to focus Lenker’s voice, and eventually touchdown at what sounds just like the again of the room the place the track echoes at a hazy distance.
