The cover of Portland composer Derek Hunter Wilson’s new album, Sculptures, finds gentle interplay between built and natural worlds. Brushy ferns and evergreens peek through an opening in moss-flecked concrete structures—nature is framed and partially obscured, a snapshot in time. The Beacon Sound release is defined by its gentle grief and regional focus. Here, coastal landscapes emerge from the vantage point of the musician’s memories.
Wilson—a multi-instrumentalist who is, somehow, entirely self-taught—has shared the stage with ambient luminaries including Colleen, Amulets, and Patricia Wolf. On Sculptures, he builds six pieces from snippets of improvised rehearsals with Location Services harpist Joshua Ward, who is Hunter’s collaborator in the improvisational duo Niksen.
“Making these pieces felt kind of sculptural to me,” Wilson explains. “I had this big block of marble—a loop or section I took from one of the rehearsals—and I was trying to figure out what that block wanted to be. How do I want to shape it?” He describes the album as an “inward journey of processing a lot of different heavy things,” focus seeping through in the record’s misty, mournful atmosphere.
On Sculptures, Wilson’s genre-swirling palette—experimental, ambient-classical, a little New Agey—centers his experience of grief following his father’s death and memories of the Pacific Northwest coastline that’s been a dear friend to him. The result is a sonic estuary. Sculptures’ waters mix and meld, blending piano phrases with drifting string instrumentation and dissolving electronic textures. You need not have conservatory training to appreciate the ways Wilson’s pieces ebb and flow.
“A Dream for Sculptures,” a poem composed by Mathias Svalina accompanying each physical copy of the LP, extends the album’s world. Its language leans naturalistic and uncanny: Vines blanket a collapsed church, pews tangle with “thorny things,” and the air thickens with “plant-wet breath.” Beneath the church’s altar, the salty sea churns.
“I asked that [Svalina] write something in response to Sculptures, but I purposely left it very open for him to just feel whatever he felt,” says Wilson. “A lot of the music is trying to transport you to a different space. I think the poem captures that initial energy of being sucked into another world, which I really love.”
Most of Sculpture’s track titles–“Fort Stevens,” “Battery 247,” “Benson Beach,” “Cape Disappointment,”—anchor themselves in the same coastal area, where Oregon and Washington divide and the Columbia River empties into the Pacific. The album features many repeated motifs, as though Wilson is continually revisiting the same sources of beauty tangled up in grief.
Wilson has completed several residencies at Seaview, Washington’s Sou’wester Lodge, and feels at home in that pocket of the coast—“as much as that’s kind of cheesy or cliche,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of meaningful memories out there, so it seemed like a way to honor some of that.”
Sculptures opens with “Fort Stevens,” establishing a plaintive, funereal tone before expansive electronic layers shudder in. Fuzzy tones cloud Wilson’s piano like an overcast morning, but sun sparkles through with Ward’s shimmery harp. Then, on “Battery 247,” a soft, repeated motif leans mysterious and ghostly. Mirabai Peart’s viola enters with pronounced melancholy against a rushing soundscape, like running water or wind grazing leaves.
“Salish Sea” starts spare with low, humming tones, then swells toward something luminous. Like its namesake, the track conjures a complex network of waterways, some dark and primordial, others bright and twinkling. “Cape Disappointment,” an album highlight, repeats a pulsing motif that feels like an underwater pull toward the surface. Here we sense Wilson wading through memory toward a swirling, realized place.
Multi-instrumentalist Raymond Richards provides a sweep of pedal steel on “Benson Beach,” the album’s lullaby-esque conclusion. His strings glide across the track like a sunset, mingling with looped textures, evoking seagull calls and a sense of acceptance.
If Wilson’s compositions became physical sculptures, they might resemble Andy Goldsworthy’s site-tied works, delicate and decaying: a sheet of ice wedged between river rocks, or an arrangement of yellowed elm leaves. Wilson describes Sculptures as “wintry” and “nocturnal,” and that feels right—the record serves as a perfect sonic backdrop to February drives, the sun dipping low early in the evening, mist clinging to the evergreens that hug Portland’s skyline.
While Sculptures honors the musician’s memories, the album doesn’t feel situated in the past, either. Wilson’s looped and textural materials feel resculpted with each listen, softening and shifting. Your own memories tangle up in the work, and that’s okay with him. “I think once you put a piece of art into the world, it's no longer yours,” Wilson says.
Derek Hunter Wilson’s Sculptures releases on Friday, February 20 and can be found on Beacon Sound’s Bandcamp as a digital download or vinyl LP. Wilson celebrates the release alongside Dao Strom and (rumored) Luke Wyland with a show at Fumi, also on February 20.
