Harmony Trowbridge - "It's Your Funeral".

Sinjin Hawke - "Don't Lose Yourself To This".

The earth is filled with species to which, or to whom, these pieces of music are identical. To a silverfish, a coral polyp, a tulip, these tracks are mostly indistinguishable, interchangeable, the noise of homo sapiens. Don't ask a fern to tell you the differences between Trowbridge's melancholy, with its glinting naked edge, or Hawke's electronica, all jackknifing cascades. Perhaps a whale could tell you something, or a blue jay; perhaps, perhaps not. I could tell you something, I can tell them apart. But there's a strange power in doing the opposite - in telling them the same. Fission is division, fusion is conjoining. "It's Your Funeral" and "Don't Lose Yourself To This" are so unalike - yet go ahead, listen for your minutes, and wherever you find commonality you are also finding might.

Is there a greater power than connecting unconnected things? Turn today into yesterday, lead into gold. The feelings and frameworks linking two sets of sounds: one murmured and acoustic, the other jabbering and artificial. Each of these songs conceals itself from sunlight. Each feels a shiver. Each is a processing, uncovering, not the settling of a thing. Harmony Trowbridge is vividly attentive to her melody, the balancing-act between sternness and sentiment. She wants to say exactly what, and no more. Sinjin Hawke, for all his overflowing, is the same: each beat is counted, each slick crash. The melody's slighter, but Hawke is just as dedicated to it - identifying his motifs, syncing them up, like lining up matching shards of mirror. Each of these songs knows itself sung backward: it has spent time in the rear-view, considering origin and decay.

[buy Harmony Trowbridge's excellent The More We Get Together, finally available as a download (previously) // Sinjin Hawke's magnum opus First Opus can be found here.]

(photo from reddit)