ML Wah “Sight Unfolding” cassette (Flower Room)

“Soon after I released 2022’s Mirrored Night and its companion tape New Horizon, while still in the midst of hand-painting the jackets for that album’s 12” lathe-cut edition, I began work on a follow-up piano record. I had volunteered to help a new friend move out of the house she’d been renting, and clocked the owners’ upright piano nestled amongst verdant potted foliage in a corner of the living room. A day or two later, as Megan continued boxing up and hauling out, I returned with a microphone plugged into my laptop, providing and recording a casual soundtrack to her packing up on that bright spring afternoon.

In contrast to Mirrored Night’s shorter piano pieces that extensively utilized live-looping, my intent with Sight Unfolding was to create longer songs out of simple, repeating phrases on the piano, and then overdub countermelodies and leads also performed as one-take improvisations. I added a second piano to the extended automatic composition that became the title track, but soon began to hear other instruments commingling in the mix. As I let the piano speak further, it whispered notes of electric guitar (“Sight Unfolding pt.1”; “Your Lotus Feet”) and, later, saxophone. In particular, Wednesday Knudsen’s saxophone. Wednesday’s genuine spirit and vision imbues every instrument she plays and each group she plays in, and I was thrilled when she welcomed this collaboration. A few weeks later, she sent over five sax takes for me to consider for the song that became “Living Space” – I opted to use not one, not two, but all five playing simultaneously, panned to different areas of the stereo field, a literal breath of fresh air. Listening back to the final mix of the album, it seemed Sight Unfolding was revealing itself as a journey, and when “Living Space” opens to invite another’s presence and perspective, it is, to me, an experience of arrival.”

-ML