Sounding 006 — A Choir of One

An album I found around its tenth anniversary and only now returned to, kept on endless repeat — a world that seems to belong to any time.

I found Alone in the Dark Wood around its tenth anniversary, a decade after it first appeared, and only lately have I come back and kept it on repeat. It is magical, in the oldest sense of the word — a spell. Fursaxa is Tara Burke, who builds almost everything here out of her own voice, looped and layered until one woman becomes a choir, over the low drone of an organ and detuned, ringing guitars. She opens a world that could belong to any time.

What holds me is that vocal orchestra: a single voice multiplied into many, wordless and medieval, echoing over itself until you can no longer tell which line came first. It is the oldest way of singing and somehow the strangest — a person alone in a room becoming a crowd of herself. Under it, the layered guitars ring like bells somewhere in a wood. I know a little about wanting to be only the surface a sound passes through; here is someone who let her own voice pass through her until it filled the whole forest.

This kind of folk is close to my heart, and it arrives down a long line — Hildegard von Bingen at the far end of it, women singing into the dark for eight hundred years, an inheritance Burke carries without ever making a show of it. Later voices came out of hers, too; you can hear where Grouper begins.

It belongs to no particular time; it could be four centuries old or made tomorrow. I left it for years and came back to find it exactly where it was — the same wood, the same voice, still singing, not moved an inch. Only I had moved. That, I think, is what the timeless things are for: not to keep us company, but to hold still long enough that we can see how far we have drifted. A record that will not age becomes a mirror for the one who must.