Perpetual Guest by Wilson Tanner Smith

For a few days at the end of July 2023, I curated a series of concerts and recordings in a few spaces in the historic, now-defunct Kreenholm Textile Factory in Narva, Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border. In Kreenholm's reverberant rooms, these sessions reflected on the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that have shaped the factory and the constantly re-evolv- ing border city.

A large and unexpected part of this project involved the restoration of an antique harmonium found in a nearby town, which had passed from church to schoolroom to living room to basement—and then to factory. Working on-site between visits from jumpy border guards, I disassembled it, cleaned out what was left by the mouse who used to call it home, and roughly made it playable again. It creaks, squeaks, buzzes, breathes, and sounds just as it does. Improvisa- tions lean into the characteristics of its reeds and levers, its material and history—human and non-human—as well as those of my cello as it sounds in these spaces. Sensing and listening to the instrument mirrored sensing and listening to factory, river, city, border...

Most of the titles on this album come from scraps of signage and other detritus found around the factory, coarsely translated to English, and from the Finnish folk melody that anchors the closing track. This was pulled from Shostakovich's obscure Suite on Finnish Themes commissioned by the Soviet Military in 1939, purportedly to be played in Helsinki after the USSR’s successful conquest of Finland. This, of course, never happened, but it echoes the spirits of silence and tension in Narva, and the role of culture in conflict and communion while these familiar narratives are repeated again during Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Sawyer Editions is a small-batch label specializing in contemporary, experimental, and improvised music, especially of new and unreleased artists.

Demos always welcome.

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