Blue Lake - Sun Arcs
Weaving between self-built zithers, drones, clarinets, slide guitars and drum machines, Sun Arcs is a beautifully unique sound offering with inventive, free spirited and DIY sensibility.
Blue Lake is the musical moniker of American born, Copenhagen based multidisciplinary artist and musician Jason Dungan, who signs to the Tonal Union imprint for the release of his new longform album Sun Arcs. It follows 2022’s release Stikling, earning a nomination for ‘Album of the Year’ at the Danish Music Awards plus warm praise from The Hum blog and musicians and DJs alike including Jack Rollo (Time is Away/NTS) and Carla dal Forno. A self taught player, Dungan began freely experimenting with self-built multi-string instruments, preferring to build his own hybrid 48-string zither and working in the realms of left-field ambient music, off kilter folk and improvised acoustic minimalism.
The starting point of Sun Arcs saw Jason travel for a week alone to Andersabo, a cabin set in the idyllic Swedish woods just outside of Unnaryd, known also as the music project, festival and residency space which has been run by Dungan since 2016, hosting artists like Sofie Birch, Johan Carøe and Ellen Arkbro. Whilst writing 1-2 pieces per day, a conscious decision was made to leave behind everyday distractions and shut out the outside world to instead focus on the natural passage of time as Dungan recalls:
“My only sense of time came from these daily walks out in the woods with my dog, and an awareness of the sun’s path as it moved across the sky each day.”
The album’s immersive world unfolds with the opener ‘Dallas’, an ode to his home state and a musical synthesis of these two disparate spaces (Texas and Denmark), the touchstones of Dungan’s life. A folk-esque single acoustic builds to a flowing arrangement of clarinets, organ and cello drones coupled with percussion. ‘Green-Yellow Field’ chimes in as the first of two solo oriented zither recordings twinned with the dreamlike title track ‘Sun Arcs’, both densely rich as cascading and overlapping harmonic tones resound. ‘Bloom’ emerges with a krautrock psyche before an eruption of cello drones, slide guitar and free-ranging zither playing, ushering in the anticipation of spring.
“The title and the feel of the song comes simply from my summers in Sweden – when the plants and insects are opening up everywhere, and there’s this almost too-intense feeling of life outside.”
With half of the recordings conceived in Andersabo, Jason returned to Copenhagen to form the album's centre piece ‘Rain Cycle’ which features a tempered Roland drum machine alongside shifting zither improvisations. ‘Writing’ explores the shimmering harp-like qualities of sweeping playing figurations with Dungan mapping out adjusted tuning “zones” on the zither for unconventional but creatively liberating effects. ‘Fur’ captures the feeling of openness and the momentum of time, seeing Dungan perform waves of solo clarinet, often in one takes and embellished with textural drones, a zither solo, and layers of guitar. ‘Wavelength’ the album's closer is fondly inspired by the film works of Michael Snow and Don Cherry’s seminal live album Blue Lake (1974), as it builds out from a drone-generated zither chord and features an alto recorder solo. Dungan found a deep connection to Cherry’s stripped back performance ethos, focusing on the core beauty of minimal instrumentation creating a genre-less meeting between folk and jazz. A dialogue is formed between the solo and the bandlike performances, interlinked in a geographical duality with all finding a sense of commonplace as musical sketches of visited landscapes. The bountiful instrumentation ebbs and flows as further layers emerge with Dungan constructing his material much like an artist would, recording and reviewing, adding and subtracting.
Musically it portrays a form of double life led by an American-identifying person living in Scandinavia, and a new found presence in Denmark, seeking out underdeveloped marshlands and barren stretches of beach adrift from other rhythms and distractions. Highlighting their individual and potent importance Dungan concludes:
“Both places feel like “me”, I think on some level the music is always some kind of self-portrait.”
Sun Arcs depicts the intricate balance of nature’s cycles and the paths outlined by the seasons, from a winter dormancy to a warm sun drenched scene. The album scales new glorying heights and further defines Dungan’s musical narrative, inhabiting a unique space in left-field, improvised and experimental music, borning his most accomplished compositions to date. A singular and visionary expression, drawing on an array of instruments and sound worlds with a renewed sense of joy and discovery.
Track by Track Commentary
1. Dallas – this began as a single guitar part, which I played a bit with the band at an earlier point in its development. To their ears it sounded very “country” so I called it Dallas, and I think it also was maybe the jumping off point for this idea of the record as a synthesis of these two spaces (Texas and Denmark) that feel like they are the twin poles of my life. Musically, it’s also quite crucial to the record as it establishes a way of working with the guitar, where I take a relatively simple guitar pattern, and build a bigger, flowing arrangement around it. So, for Dallas, this includes adding clarinets, organ, cello drones, and percussion.
2. Green-Yellow Field – This is simply a live improvisation on the zither, recorded up at Andersabo. I think it was made on my last day of recording, when I was trying out new tunings on the instrument. I think it represents for me this kind of pure space where you’re just in a dialogue with the instrument and tuned out from the rest of the world.
3. Bloom – Another song that started life as a fairly simple guitar part that I wanted to use as a scaffold for some free-ranging playing on the zither, as well as some slide guitar. The title and the feel of the song come simply from summer in Sweden – when the plants and insects are opening up everywhere, and there’s this almost too-intense feeling of life outside. I spend every winter longing for this feeling of flowers and plants and buzzing bees and I was looking to communicate this feeling of anticipation and release in the music. The erupting cello drone in the middle is a kind of loose approximation of this opening up for me, and the tracer lines of slide guitar and zither are for me a picture of this bustling, humming life out in the woods.
4. Rain Cycle – On the Stikling LP, I used a lot of drones made with the organ. Here I wanted to combine a more fluctuating sound of long tones from the cello together with live improv on the zither. The zither part was done in one take, initially just to try out the structure, but I liked the take so much I built the song around it. I use a Roland drum machine here, and I really like the way its steady sound rubs up against the zither, which is always shifting and changing.
5. Writing – Another zither piece made at Andersabo. I wanted to explore the instrument’s harp-like capabilities, and played a lot of sweeping figures on the instrument. I combined this together with light accompaniment from the pump organ, keyboard, and cymbals. The title for me kind of refers to this idea that a lot of writers have which is that to get things done, you simply write a certain amount every day, no matter what. I was in this kind of zone during this period, where I was really doing nothing but playing music all day for a week, and the piece came together quickly during one of these morning improv sessions.
6. Fur – On my first night in Andersabo, I unpacked all my instruments and started recording. I had this simple two-chord guitar part, which I recorded and then played a clarinet solo in a single take. I ended up finishing the song in Copenhagen, where I added waves of clarinet, a zither solo, and layers of guitar. For me, this song captures the feeling of openness I had towards the music at Andersabo, as well as the process of refinement that I put the music through in Copenhagen. The title is a dedication to my dog who was sleeping on the floor during the whole recording process at Andersabo.
7. Sun Arcs – Late in the recording process, I was working for a couple of weeks on another layered piece, which was quite complex and had a lot of moving parts. It wasn’t coming together to my satisfaction, except for a small group of echoing notes played on the slide guitar. I ended up scrapping this song, but I kept the slide guitar and played a short improvisation on the zither over it. It felt to me like a condensation of the whole LP in miniature.
8. Wavelength – For many years, I made films as an artist. When I was studying film in Vermont in the late 1990s, I was lucky enough to see a few of Michael Snow’s films, including his great film “Wavelength”, built out of a never-ending zoom and a really beautiful ascending drone on the soundtrack. Snow’s weird, funny, difficult, beautiful films have been a big inspiration for my ideas about art and music. This song is a recording of a piece I have been playing live as part of my solo set. It includes a solo on an alto recorder, played against a drone generated by a zither chord. The piece for me always had a sense of something long and flowing, constantly changing but connected to an internal structure, that reminded me in an abstract way of Snow’s film.
