01 December 2019 - 0 Comments

"The unyielding motivation in Hill’s music,” Nat Hentoff writes in the liner notes to pianist Andrew Hill’s 1965 record Point of Departure, “is his desire to keep finding out who he is and to make his music out of that deepening knowledge.” Hentoff, Hill and liner notes are all dead, but it seems as though with some kind of spectral prescience they were summing up Sarah Mary Chadwick’s project, which takes place, seated at a piano, a half century later.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a musical career today so dedicated to plumbing the depths, so unafraid to put its hand into the fire – now that “experiments” in music are clichés, and “emotion” is a post-ironic game of double-bluff. It’s for this reason that I need to offer a word of caution about this record – which should come affixed like those “Parental Advisories” which so reified the CDs which bore them.

This music is hard. Not in the sense of machismo or of complexity or of book-smarts or even tunelessness (there’s melodies for days), but in the sense that you will come into contact with great pain. It’s probably Sarah’s, but it might be yours, and as such this disc needs to be handled carefully, as though it glows with some kind of half-life accrued from traumas across a lifetime. Pain, indeed, is one of the ways we can go the deepest, like Fred Nietzsche says (and I’ll try not to over-intellectualise, the album doesn’t): “Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us … to descend into our ultimate depths… I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’ – but I know that it makes us deeper.”

And sometimes, for me at least, the music here is like being burned over “green wood,” like staying a little too late at the party, like sleeping a little too long in the middle of the day and waking up not knowing where you are.

But it’s a lot more than that – don’t worry. There’s joy here, lots of it, and humour too, which is another way we can go deep, if we know what we’re doing – and Sarah does. And what’s more there’s moments here that are neither funny nor tragic but both, like those tangled knots which make up the real stuff of our lives, like pet cemeteries, hangovers, or like the rope holding up the pants of one of Beckett’s old grubbers.

All this to say be careful, but have fun too – talking like a parent as you come down the stairs and head out to do who knows what – there’s riches to be found at the bottom of that muddy, icy water, but make sure you end up at somebody’s house, dried off with the heater on, drinking a brandy. That’s where Sarah’ll be, so don’t worry too much.

Text by Clarence Bigley

About Sarah Mary Chadwick:

Multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sarah Mary Chadwick is not a new face to Melbourne's music community. After moving to Australia from her native New Zealand to pursue a career in music, Sarah spent a decade fronting the grunge band Batrider. Eventually becoming tired of the collaborative requirements intrinsic to band life, Sarah shifted her focus to songwriting independently, drawing inspiration from “weird old New Zealand musicians” like Peter Jefferies, Chris Knox and Australia’s Pip Proud and the way they tinker away and work for decades for “little to no commercial success.” This inspiration is obvious in Sarah’s performance as she simultaneously savors and mocks the pedestal that her creativity affords her, acknowledging that “it's a position of power being on a microphone” and how “it's a desperate demand to be seen. It's funny and really sad.”

To listen to Sarah’s music is to be a quiet observer to her thoughts on love, death and mental health. Sometimes this anguish bears itself in sullen, quiet moments, but more often torment manifests at the break of Sarah’s voice as she sing-shouts painfully vulnerable, self-aware lyrics.

Her new album Please Daddy is out January 24th on Rice Is Nice Records (AU/NZ) and Sinderlyn Records (US). Listen to the title track and see album info below.

Listen: Sarah Mary Chadwick - Please Daddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1GNX9_zy4&feature=youtu.be

Pre-Order:Sarah Mary Chadwick - Please Daddy
https://sarahmarychadwick.ffm.to/pleasedaddyalbum.opr

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