Ashley Paul’s New Record Chronicles the Strangeness of New Motherhood

Free Radicals is Noisey’s column dedicated to experimental music. Each month, we take a look at the trends emerging from the fringes and why they’re meaningful.

Sometimes all it takes is a dropped call to make you think about how odd time is. Midway through a conversation with the experimental composer Ashley Paul, an emergency flood warning notification flashes on my phone with that ungodly half-Mallard-half-cargo-ship honk. It punctures her quiet meditations on the role salutary role music can play in the life of a troubled person, and—for some reason—crashes the messenger app, ending our conversation altogether. It’s a stormy April morning in Brooklyn, where I’m calling Paul from, and a sunny afternoon in London, where she lives.

My socks are soaked from a long walk from the train, and she’s in a cheerful mood, coming down from her first performance on the back her of a new album Lost in Shadows. As I call her back, I have a second to think about how I’m not really calling her at any specific time, but, from a cosmic perspective, at every time all at once, and in every weather. (I’m sorry this is just the way my brain works.)The thought of my smallness is briefly overwhelming, but I make my peace with it, and continue the conversation thinking that somehow her music reflects all of this—the childlike joy of the first days of spring, the damp end of a long winter, the joy of new beginnings, and a fair amount of existential terror—conjured from simple means, usually just a guitar, her voice, a few horns and some found sounds.

Over the last decade, Paul has made dozens of records (“two to four a year” at her peak) that use those few tools to channel all sorts of complicated emotions. Her lyrics are often abstract, but in the misty abstractions of her compositions—which are based both in her background in free improv and jazz saxophone—she strikes an unlikely balance between childlike glee, solipsistic silence, creeping melancholia, and anxious chaos. She has this song called “Sail” from her 2013 album Line the Clouds that remains to this day one of the most weirdly affecting songs I’ve ever heard, bobbing tentatively along its path as if it might at any moment dissolve into back into its component parts. Somehow it hangs together, a sound of cautious perseverance amidst a din of barely in-key whines from her horns. That record garnered the attention of press attuned to experimental music—it was one of The Wire’s favorite records of the year—but all the rest of her records are as endearing in their own way. They all kinda feel like they’re about to fall apart, but somehow don’t—a comfort to me, a person who feels always on the verge of falling apart, and somehow doesn’t.

Recently her output slowed a bit. Until earlier this month, She hadn’t released a record in nearly four years, a relative eternity for an artist as prolific as Paul. She explains that she’s lived a lot since then, she’s settled into her life in London after moving there from Brooklyn half a decade ago. She’s played a lot of shows, committing herself to really figuring out how to translate her songs to the stage, rather than focusing on plumbing further into the emotions that fueled them. But in the midst of that process, she got pregnant. She performed and traveled up until the very last moment her doctor would allow her, and then she had her first child, a daughter named Cora, which took over her life entirely.

In mid-April, the boundary-pushing label Slip put out Lost in Shadows, a strange and profound collection of pieces fueled by the unsettled headspace that new motherhood put her in. It’s built around the same pieces as her previous recordings—those swirling horns, foreboding whispers, and delirious guitar lines—but it feels a more assured treading of those conceptual borders, as if in her sleep deprivation and boundless new love, she truly understood the cacophonous simultaneity her work has always evoked.

“The feeling that I had then was all-consuming,” she says. “I felt very prepared to be a mom until I became a mom and then I felt like I didn’t know anything. There was so much new emotional content in my life. I thought I had things sorted and then the rug got taken out from under me.”

Following in the footsteps of a musically inclined sister who was eight years older and a guitarist father, Paul has been playing music for virtually as long as she can remember. She says first begged her mom for piano lessons at the age of three, and would horrify her sister by going and “hanging off the back of the bench.” She went to the New England Conservatory to study jazz saxophone, which marked the first steps toward finding her voice as a solo artist. It started with losing hope in the “male-dominated, high-testosterone” program she was in, and with the super formal styles of jazz she was immersed in. “I got disillusioned with every idea of what I thought I wanted to do with my life,” she remembers. “Everything went dark.”

Once she left the program, she turned her back on the saxophone for a year. She moved to New York, focused on visual art, and worked a job managing a shoe store. When she quit that gig—”One day I was just like ‘ Fuck this is horrible. I moved to New York what am I doing?’”—she started busking in the subways at the suggestion of her former classmate at NEC, the saxophonist and multimedia artist Matana Roberts. “I wasn’t making loads of money but I was making enough to live on,” she says. “I was paying my rent in quarters.”

Eventually she went to grad school for improvisation, where she met the experimental percussionist Eli Keszler, who convinced her that she needed to start recording some of her own music. Picking up all the instruments in the house she lived in, she started playing guitar and singing, drawing on her improv training as well as the legacy of freaked out melodicists she became infatuated with in New York, like no-wave guitarist and songwriter Arto Lindsay. Paul quickly came into her own as a songwriter.

In 2008, she released her debut record D.O.L. which crystallized a number of the themes and ideas she’s still working with today. It’s a grayscale record of foggy ambience conjured from shattered guitar lines, barely functioning electronics, and long sustained tones from distant bells and her arsenal of horns. Its unsettling and otherworldly, the sort of record that feels like it exists somewhere in the liminal spaces between here and hereafter. Each record since has offered a subtle variation on the sound: small, quiet, and deceptively chaotic—a portrait of disheveledness and a rejection of the very idea of perfection. No doubt she cares very much about what it sounds like, but the gesture still feels very casual: as if to say this is how I am, take it or leave it.

Over the years, writers have continually, for these reasons and others, referred to Paul’s music as “intimate.” It pops up in virtually every review of her work, but to Paul that makes sense. Because she works intuitively, trying as best she can to shut out the outside world of other people’s lyrics and other people’s chords, she feels like her work is a very honest reflection of her unfiltered self. To invite people into that, especially in a live setting, is an intimate thing. “The place in which the music is created is almost a physical place in my body,” she says. “When I perform live I’m definitely in that space. My goal is to draw people into that space with me so we’re having a collective experience.”

Lost in Shadows, by those standards, is her most intimate gesture yet, an invitation into a headspace during an incredibly personal time in her life. Far away from her family and keeping the precarious hours of early parenthood, Paul describes the period as “an incredibly loving time” but a “dark and lonely one” too. She says she still hasn’t slept for more than a five-hour chunk since her daughter was born, and there were many nights where she was up every two hours to feed her. “It changes the way your brain functions,” she says with a laugh. “I definitely float through days now.”

Though thinking about music was tough for those first few months, eventually the urge to create came back, around the time Paul was offered a three-week residency at a program in Zaragoza, Spain. She brought her partner and Cora with her, and the music flowed out of her, almost torrentially. “I only found out about [the residency] two months before I went and as I drew closer all this tension was building up in me,” she says. “I probably wasn’t that nice of a person to be around because all I wanted to do was work. By the time we finally got there I was bursting.”

She recorded the 11 otherworldly pieces that make up Lost in Shadows in that period, as well as eight more tracks that didn’t make the album. She soared through it, channeling all the uneasy energy and experiences of the preceding year.

It’s not that the music itself is easier, but, perhaps because the feelings of motherhood are so fresh, she darts between the harsh sounds and the more melodic bits in an even more graceful way. Songs like the album opener “Blanquita”—named for what the Zaragozanos called her daughter (“white”)—are full of the curdled pops and unsettled melodies of her past work, but it’s as if she’s hovering somewhere above it rather than trudging through the sludge.

“Music has always been a place that was entirely mine,” Paul affirms.

“I probably existed on that border before but maybe that border drew that some clarity through the experience of becoming a parent,” Paul says. She’s said before that day-to-day existence can be a difficult thing, but Cora’s birth has given her a new focus. “I’m not very good at living normally,” she says. “Now that I’m responsible for another human being, it’s much easier for me to make sure that she’s well taken care of than to make sure that I’m taken care of.” Cora always has meals on the table, she says, but sometimes she’ll forget to eat. “I’ll make sure her doctors appointments are made but I’ll have a tooth falling out or something,” she says. “It’s much easier to take care of other people.”

The process of making music has always been a respite from the burdens of the world (“Music has always been a place that was entirely mine,” Paul affirms) but the beauty of Lost in Shadows is that the music itself is starting to feel like an escape too. Critics have heard the tenuousness of the melodies, and the close harmonies, and they hear discord, darkness and worry—the bruise-like qualities that the cover explores. But if you listen closer you can hear something else at the core, in the shimmering bells and luminous saxophones. “When I hear it, it’s shiny,” Paul says. “I think it’s a joyous album.” Somewhere in there is the sound of new life and new love, a balm for those of us who remain overwhelmed.

Colin Joyce is an editor from Noisey, and is on Twitter.