The Breakdown
Saskatchewan sound artist and producer Michael Scott Dawson is someone who’s both artistically prolific and restless. A stalwart for the Torontonian We Are Busy Bodies label, he’s released three solo albums plus two other records as a lead member of post-rock minimalists Peace Flag Ensemble, and all since 2020. But Dawson’s momentum has been cruelly interrupted recently with increasing hearing problems hindering his music making for solo album four. Reaching out to his ‘Busy Bodies’ buddies to find a way forward, the collaborative route was suggested as a way to get his new creative ideas out into the open. So now in the shape of ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ we have the result, the latest Michael Scott Dawson album with each track pivoting on his creative partnership with a different musician.
An ingenious work around then but you could ask, if you’re feeling picky, what’s the fall out? Well, there is none. On ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ Dawson’s atmospheric blend of shimmering ambience, calming minimalism and expansive cosmic country reaches another level of intensity. His collaborators bring inspiration from post-rock to lo-fi pop, free jazz to glitch and beyond, consequently expanding the sound palette for Dawson to share. ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ features saxes, clarinet, piano, vocal and spoken word as well as a plethora of guitar styles and timbres all feeding into Dawson’s own sensitive electronic and sourced soundscapes. But the increased range of instrumentation is really only of superficial significance. What leaves the deepest impression is that sharing the development of each track with another artist has quirkily resulted in Michael Scott Dawson’s most personal and moving album to date.
As well as this sustained emotional pull, ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ maintains an overall sonic coherency to build its impact. The album opens and closes with pieces featuring a like-minded explorer of cinematic Americana Michael Grigoni. These tunes are perhaps the most connected to ambient country soundscapes of ‘Find Yourself Lost’, Dawson’s third album. Opener Mojave Flows gently thrums into life, sighing keys, sound whispers, bird song and rustling grasses all rippling beneath Grigoni’s lapsteel which sighs and plucks out droplets of notes. It’s music zoomed in on small detail, pinpointed within the widest open space. Travelling Light, where Grigoni and Dawson meet again, concludes the collection on a similar guitar yearning journey. Here the chords are full, the mood ethereal and the suggestion more celestial, looking to the sky and hinting at closure, maybe…
Between these two events ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ uncurls gracefully. The guitar often appears central to the sound but always offered in different shades and colours. On Quiet Haunt Tokyo based guitarist/producer Yutaka Hirasaka joins Dawson to bring multi-layers of harmonics, reverse loops and twinkling melodies to this sublime song. In contrast Congolese picker Vumbi Dekula injects Fondness with a jaunty Soca sway, his rootsy acoustic licks buzzing sunnily around Dawson’s burbling synths. It’s a tune which oozes shared joy. Change Your Mind completes the sequence of guitar-centric pieces on the album, featuring the upcoming Americana innovator Eli Winter. The track has a William Tyler, slow panning motion guided by Winter’s earthy toned fluidity and tumbling raga patterns. At one point the tune almost breaks into a funky two-stepping chug as some grainy square dance memory edges into the frame.
It’s a tribute to Michael Scott Dawson’s clarity of purpose that such acoustic-tinged music gels readily with the album tracks he’s developed with fellow ambient/experimental explorers. Where There Is Happiness, There Is Happiness, which welcomes M.Sage to the recording along with his “mystic music box”, merges woodwind notes and acoustic strums with a tidal layers of alien synth to conjure a state beyond meditation. More otherworldliness comes on Make Time, where Dawson with seminal electronic composer Suso Saiz go symphonic, and when Akron glitch traveller K Freund pitches in for Monolake, the subtlest pulse gently mesmerises. Vocal and spoken word also naturally flow into the album’s course on 나도 너도 우리 모두 , with Korean improviser Dasom Baek’s soothing, phone-distant monologue, mysterious but also strangely re-assuring.
Perhaps the most ambitious progressions for Dawson on the album though are the pieces he’s created with friends more closely associated with jazz. Of course he has previous in this direction as a member of Saskatchewan free jazz collective Peace Flag Ensemble, who unsurprisingly also contribute to ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’, instilling The Treadmill Of My Worries with their intuitive ECM spaciousness. Elsewhere the elegant Present Day features future-jazz experimenter Jairus Sharif whose bluesy, fluttering horn melody nestles within Dawson’s harmonium hums and delicate guitar peels. Another uplifting sax-crooned statement is provided by Lina Langendorf on the stoic I’ll Always Answer, a weary beauty of a tune, a slow ballad crying out through Langendorf’s breath filled, exposed notes.
In many ways this brief track captures the directness which gives ‘The Tinnitus Chorus’ its real edge. Michael Scott Dawson has always looked to inject an emotional perspective to his work but here he seems to be revealing more of himself. Maybe his difficult experiences surrounding the album have driven such self reflection and openness but the result is an album that will reach out and enrich anyone who cares to tune in.
Get your copy of ‘The Tinnitus Chorus‘ by Michael Scott Dawson from your local record store or direct from We Are Busy Bodies HERE
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