Mother Tongue

Antonio Poscic writes about Karen Juhl's zeitgeisty, genre-hopping debut.

The first string of harpsichord-like pulses and firmly enunciated words that unfold on Danish composer Karen Juhl's debut album brings forth an elevated ambiance reminiscent of Félicia Atkinson's recent vocal-centric works (especially Image Langage) and Olivia Louvel's experimental but abjectly tactile 2020 release SculptOr. Each of these records and approaches branches off in different directions, but they remain connected by a kindred attraction to language, picking apart words and phrases and then reimagining them as musical elements. But where Atkinson and Louvel use verbal expressions like associative triggers and plaster for sonic sculpting, Juhl seems more interested in how idioms play a role in interpreting the past and shaping future experiences.

Juhl's approach is not quite Whorfian. Rather than digging into the idea that languages affect cognition and perspective, she uses thoughts collected throughout her life, both virtual and material, to forge an avant, post-internet incantation whose internal energy attracts and assembles all the other samples and instruments. In the aforementioned opener, “Mother's Garden,” the initial pointillistic clusters of sound soon begin to move like a flock of birds. Here, the combination of fluttering hi-hat samples and Juhl's budding singsong are panned hard and isolated, giving a sense of listening to a binaural recording. “In 2004 they enlarged the Union.” We hear these words embedded in a sequence of phrases that resembles a stream of consciousness, an enigmatic personal narrative, but the inflection drips with gravitas and raw emotion, contrasting with the hard, bureaucratic symbolism.

As Juhl lets her thoughts shape the music, each of the subsequent cuts takes on the form of a disparate genre. “London Athens” and its zeitgeist-informed anxieties of international travel and isolation bring a poppier visage. Along with a lovely bit of sound design – voices multiply and appear simultaneously on different planes and from different directions – the song is characterized by the constructive interference of start-and-stop structures, xylophone-like reverberations, and fluid inner currents. This flow soon breaks on the sharp cliffs of "Bloodline," a fragmented piece whose fractal structure is filled with spectral r&B and technoid growths that crystallize around words, phrases, and lines, hugging them tightly and following their contours.

Meanwhile, “Whole World In My Hands” and “Between My Breasts” encompass the album's entire emotional gamut, moving from extreme to extreme, starting with an expansive, warm, and embracing ambient texture and ending in uncomfortable, subterranean frequencies. “I'm exhausted, I'm jobless,” Juhl sings. “For one minute we were silent.” As the music begins to taper off, a gentle magenta haze descends on the mood, akin to slipping into a hypnagogic state. Both “Home” and “Face Wash” are uncomplicated pieces, with Juhl's translucent articulation and smooth timbre taking center stage, pushing all other effects to the background. Even in these final, nearly blissful moments of Mother Tongue, there is plenty of theatricality and melodrama – as evidenced by a recent concert at Christianshavns Beboerhus in Copenhagen. The schmaltz projected here feels earned and lived in, possessing the sort of authentic spirit needed to bring words to life.