09/01/2026
Coming out next week on Sawyer Editions is Wilson Tanner Smith's debut portrait disc "Perpetual Guest" (link below). really stoked of this batch of albums, and this one in particular scratches so many itches. Check it!
'Perpetual Guest' is an album of site-specific harmonium and cello improvisations in an abandoned Kreenholm Textile factory in Narva, Estonia. It draws from deep listening, ambient, free improv traditions -- mostly on an antique German harmonium which I sourced, repaired, and installed for performances and recording sessions in the factory while in residence at the Narva Art Center in summer 2023.
The music interacts with the unique acoustics of the Kreenholm Factory's massive, reverberant rooms, and takes inspiration from the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that can be felt as “spirits” lingering in now-quiet factory spaces, exemplified at times by the subtle shadings of texture, tuning, and timbre latent in the reeds and levers of the harmonium—or in the threads of a quotation from a geo-politically charged Finnish folk song. It engages as well with the particular kind of silence felt in this small city directly at “Europe’s border with Russia” in the midst of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
