Susannah Stark - Minor Gestures

Drifting in on a stream of birdsong, synths and field recordings of rivers, Susannah Stark posits questions from the outset of Minor Gestures, her second studio album. Sung in both Gàidhlig and English, Stark is in constant dialogue with her surroundings, with history, mythology and with the listener on her second album for cult label Stroom of Brussels and Glasgow’s Night School. Recorded with an ensemble curated from the worlds of experimental and folkloric music in her adopted city, Minor Gestures is an omni-directional conversation, open-ended and infused with curiosity and sensitivity. Using primarily acoustic instruments and folk modalities, the songs here display an almost preternatural confidence as Stark shifts perspectives and narratives throughout. Minor Gestures is a body of work that celebrates standing in vulnerability and cultivating resistance to the onset of the corporatisation of daily life. Stark’s duo-linguistic approach feels like a love letter both to the Gàidhlig language and term for translation: eadar- theangachadh, 'inter-tonguing' itself as a creative act. Much of the album was composed from visual cues, and experimenting with the fundamentals of existing in bodies, in this time and place: breath, drone, whisper, song, and primal rhythms inhabiting the unknown space of the mouth. These practices suffuse Minor Gestures with a physicality and immediacy that feel akin to practice of zen meditation: in an age of constant distraction and speed, perhaps truly living, with all its corporeality and massiveness is a form of resistance? A leap forward from the more electronic and solitary practice of her previous album Time Together, Minor Gestures features collaborators Phil Cardwell, Caroline Hussey, and seasoned percussionist Laurie Pitt, who's combination of abstraction and intuitive rhythm provides a tactility to the music. Joining the ensemble more recently, Hussey’s accordion is the thread that ties the album together, offering expansive pitch bending notes and drones which the other musicians play off. “Which way does a river go?” Stark asks on opener Caochan, directly addressing the water, which itself responds in Gàidhlig. On Ceistean gun freagairtean, Stark’s voice sits above soft-blown trumpet and accordion drones, asking questions that explicitly require no answers. Instead, the questions are used as linguistic signposts of the myriad perspectives contained in the song: people wracked with existential dread, the singer’s conversation with a dead lover from a Pictish cave burial. Minor Gestures describes the worlds around it with boundless sensitivity, searching curiosity and a collective love that permeates each instrument, voice and gesture documented across the 8 recordings. Second single Trì stiùirichean makes ample use of Stark’s vocal, augmented with close harmonies that are have a faint redolence of Gàidhlig psalm singing and traditional folk music melodies. Stark’s deftness with melody and atmosphere manages to be highly evocative of both Scottish musical traditions and ambient-adjacent practices while steering a path between both. Like the subjects of the song, the musicians are travelling, interwoven, sailing close but never quite resolved. A reference to the Govan knot, here the form of the music is the message. Mu choinneamh, ri taobh features guest vocals from Cinder (Cindytalk) and is a spacious, wide-open chasm of sound which the voices of Stark and her sister Katherine hover above. On closer Minor Gestures - as on its parent album - the natural world, the mythological, narrative worlds we construct, historical worlds didactically enforced on us and the rigidity of reality - the real world - are all challenged and set free. The protagonist morphs, changes form, dissipates into the natural world, re-anthropomorphises and evaporates again. The music provokes, posits questions, gurgling synths swirl into the upper register, percussion babbles like the rivers of the album’s beginning. On Minor Gestures, Susannah Stark opens up its myriad worlds to the listener but never describes them fully. Instead the listener is invited to discover for themselves. Stark and her band have provided a sonically tactile, almost physical space for this exploration, for these questions to be asked. Which way does a river go?