Memory and imagination share an intimate bond. Both consist in representing objects that are currently absent. This connection is explored on the newest album by Gareth Davis and Scanner (Robin Rimbaud). The long-term collaborators work with clarinets, synths and field recordings, which they process extensively until plastic drone textures full of melancholy and tenderness emerge. Across the two long-form compositions, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether one is listening to a woodwind instrument or a sawtooth wave. This effect is intended and expertly implemented.
First, it gives Songlines a warm timbre. Second, this indistinguishability is thematic. In Aboriginal mythology, “songlines” refer to the paths of creator beings that are traced through songs, stories, dances and visual art. In the skilled hands of Davis and Rimbaud, this idea is translated into memories of “an imagined biography of places that might or might not have been, but somehow seem to exist”. Like a novel à la Proust, the album sketches intimate places as if they were retrieved from memory during the second year of psychoanalysis. And yet these places remain ephemeral and hazy. It is difficult to determine what is real, what is projection and what is fiction. Still, for listeners who enjoy following such lines, this album is very much the right place.
