Desire Path by Zoltan Fecso & Anna Morley

Words by Genevieve Callaghan:

‘To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living in hope.’ - Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

I spend an entire day listening to Desire Path, on repeat. Not running breathlessly, but ambling. With a sort of soft but certain determination, towards some promise of something. Peace, maybe. Or just refuge.

I press play on my phone as I leave my house and Reunion begins. A slow procession, webbed with filaments of synth, each strand connecting the glowing, globulous vibraphone. It shifts, in places. Incorporates a haze—barely-there, but felt. I am walking through the world, but I am encased in a capsule of muted, powdery sound, floating on a pulse.

A voice counts 1, 2, 3, and Vetiver begins. The scales resonate, bleeding towards some limit before they reach their critical mass and fall, in viscous droplets, into the next track, A Pooled Reflection. Crystalline and refracted, the watery vibraphone meets with pointier pieces of synth; a sci-fi sound; the beeps of a space station control panel. All of it throws a shifting, audible light to the ceilings. I make a note.

Is this what half-asleep sounds like? Or the feeling of swimming?

Flight of Starlings expands the album’s marriage of the electronic and the elemental from the waters into the skies. Girasol unfolds in solemn petals against an almost ecclesiastical drone. I see stained glass. I smell frankincense. And then we come to Butterflies. Its opening notes, diffuse but insistent, strike me with a strange familiarity. Is there something of 10CC here? Godley & Greme? Or is it reminding me of the theme of something from daytime television, from my childhood? Something played against a blurred, peachy backdrop, keen and beseeching? It ends before I can remember, so softly I only realise after many seconds of silence. And then I see we are at the end of Desire Path. But I am still suspended. So I press play, again.

The sound of half-asleep. The feeling of swimming.

Both acts surge in pursuit of their object; the dream; the water’s edge. They both, like this album, wend their ways towards a longed-for thing.

But the sleeper crawls into the bed, don’t they? And the swimmer plunges into the pool. Because for all our reaching for things, we love to be immersed in the liminal space. We love to hover in the agitated gap between outset and goal; not yet arrived at the object of our desire, but on the path to it.

zoltanfecso.com
annamorleymusic.com