Mary Jane Leach, the avant garde composer attached to the New York downtown scene of the 1980s, has a small but significant cadre of recorded work to her name, but is perhaps better known for her tireless efforts to help preserve and endorse the legacy of Julius Eastman. Undeniably admirable as that is, her own music is arguably worthy of similar attention. Blume’s reissue of her 1989 work Pipe Dreams in 2019 certainly helped turn a few more heads her way and contextualise her vision within a series that also featured archival work by Eastman, Phil Niblock, Alvin’s Lucier and Curran et al. After a few other contemporary pieces for Modern Love, she now returns to Pipe Dreams for parts II and III. Recorded in first Gent and then Cologne in 2023 and 2024 respectively, Leach embraces what she acknowledges has essentially been a lifelong interest in the aesthetics of space and sound that the organ allows her to explore. The results are dense and intoxicating, eliciting that kind of feeling where as a listener you’re no longer cognisant of where you are in the music. How many minutes have we been here? How many hours? How many more? Perhaps this is where the ‘dream’ element comes in, cloudy, dissociative, almost shapeless sound that you can get lost in because it rejects conventional structures and measures. Part III is especially effective in this regard, an improvised performance that finds Leach acting instinctively, finding patterns within the pitch that lead her in specific directions, though you may not be able to discern exactly what or where. Maybe part of the allure of drone resides somewhere in that dissonance between the practice/process and the experience of the listener, each drawing their own joys from the event, hearing something the other is not, that might not even be there. Leach jokes that she wasn't hallucinating when she made III - she may have simply been dreaming instead. Pipe Dreams, like all dreams but even more so, are elusive things.
FFO: Kali Malone, Ellen Fullman, Julius Eastman, Sarah Davachi
