Kitsune No Yomeiri, which translates to the fox’s wedding, is an endearing expression used to describe sunshowers. Dawson returned home from a recent tour of Japan with a collection of field recordings documenting the spring rain he encountered throughout his travels. These curious sounds, stretching from peaceful shrines to clattering city streets, underpin the material.
Dawson also credits the wonderful folks he met on that tour with profoundly shaping the direction of the album. After each show he found himself immersed in inspiring conversations about the guitar. Through navigating the language barrier, he discovered he was communicating with an immense sincerity that he would ordinarily avoid at all costs. “I’ve always just made records at home in a vortex, but this time it felt like those conversations were there with me in the studio.”
Musically the album has a slight western slant. It’s not country, but it does see Dawson lean softly into his prairie past. Constellations of stray notes and rusted tones form nostalgic melodies, like chance encounters between old friends. Dawson allows phrases and gestures to repeat across the record, resulting in a collection that’s more akin to turning the pages of a novel than a series of vignettes vying for attention.
Long Slow Distance is an album about finding peace, and making peace where it can’t be found. It’s inspired by change, grief, acceptance, forgiveness, love, and running.
Dawson began running around the same time he started making records. At this point it’s unclear where one practice ends and the other begins. The album’s title has become the ethos he’s embraced for all things in life.
Long Slow Dance unravels the woven collage of his previous work. Here each song consists of three long guitar takes, panned across the stereo-field with minimal overdubs. “I remember my grandmother always kept a rain barrel on the farm. Just a simple vessel that served as a means for gathering water for the garden and the flowers. I wanted to instill that sentiment on this record. Other than some panning and recreational EQing, the computer was just a vessel to gather sounds.”
There is a distant grace to the album. A soft expanse, a quiet contrast. Guitars dissolve and then recalibrate. Sparse melodic motifs bloom and fracture. Warm chords clash and make amends. Alpenglow textures shimmer against tones that feel weathered by salt air. The songs are lightly propulsive, yet drift at a glacial pace. Fields and artifacts ground the material, like keeping your eyes on the horizon. Long Slow Distance feels intuitive, sentimental, and like Dawson is one step closer to whatever distance he is chasing.
Downloadable Assets
Dawson’s latest offering, The Tinnitus Chorus, is an album of wide-eyed collaborations. He is joined by an inspired cast of revered friends and kindred strangers including Suso Saiz, M. Sage (Fuubutsushi), Eli Winter, K. Freund, (Trouble Books / Lemon Quartet), Dasom Baek, Lina Langendorf (Langendorf United), Vumbi Dekula, Jairus Sharif, Yutaka Hirasaka, and his bandmates in Peace Flag Ensemble. The collection is bookended by two pieces with Michael Grigoni. From birdsong and decaying tape to Western sprawl, each of Dawson’s previous solo records have moved in a singular direction but here he approaches things through a kaleidoscopic lens. While his weathered ambient sketches serve as a through line, they are woven with all manner of instrumentation from clarinet and modular synth to steel guitars and flugelhorn. Improvised Congolese guitar nuzzles next to American experimental folk. Handmade electronics give way to spiritual sax. M. Sage contributes something referred to as a “mystic music box”. The result is a strange and beautiful journey that feels lost between genres and yet wholly unified. Dawson reflects on the genesis of album with a smirk and a shrug. He has been marred by ear troubles in recent years and had been struggling to complete an album of solo material. The clicks, ringing tones, and hiss in his ears had been drowning out the ringing tones, clicks, and hiss in his studio. When he reached out to We Are Busy Bodies to provide an update on the record he was met with an unsuspecting proposal that perhaps he shift focus to an album of collaborations. The truth is he had been ruminating on the idea for years and the nudge from WABB proved to be the motivation he needed to shelve his insecurities and invite artists he admires to join him for The Tinnitus Chorus.
