If there’s one thing anyone comes to learn in life, it’s that the imperfect memory of bygone days is the only thing that lasts. It lives in buildings decaying from erosion; in the crinkling photo albums yellowing from maturity; in the depth of feelings born even from a brain’s shoddiest recall. In her music, Natalia Beylis dives into that transience, sculpting place-setting soundscapes that evoke the mysteries of the spaces she explores. With Lost – For Annie, the Irish sound artist illustrates the ghosts of Irish sweathouses and felled trees from four different angles—ambient meditation, interviews, textural interplay, and field recordings. Each offers a means of unearthing the feelings that are buried deep inside.
Lost – For Annie collages together ideas that exist across Beylis’ practice, which seeks to connect perspectives and places, past and present. Much of her music has grown from found objects and sounds that come from somewhere she’s visited in Ireland; in the case of her acclaimed album Mermaids, she wrote ambient music inspired by a sepia-toned image she found using an aging electric keyboard she discovered at a local recycling center. Lost – For Annie leans even further into her ability to craft images from sound, sculpting music out of the texture of footsteps or the flutter of birdsongs.
Throughout, words, stories, and the way they’re told become music as much as Beylis’ melodies. “Interviews with Participants of the Leitrim Sweathouse Project” features interviews held as part of Monumental Healing, a project made in collaboration with artists Laura Gallagher and Kate Murtagh Sheridan that explores the connection between sound, place, and heritage through Irish sweathouses. Interviewees consider their relationship to these healing spaces and different people describe similar memories—the aches and pains, the way they come and go from the houses but always remember how they made them feel. Beylis stitches each story together to animate these repetitions, showing how different voices and experiences can become one.
Similarly, Beylis’ musical tracks piece together snippets of sound into rhythmic and meditative snapshots. On the title track, one particularly striking section blossoms from the crunch of footsteps in soil; their even pace holds steady like the drums and bass of a band, until one foot slides a little into mud, or another skips a step. There’s a feeling of solitude despite its methodical ease: The optimistic bird chirps that soar above the ground come from animals who occupy this land, but the place has been forever altered by commercial forestry, threatening their very livelihood. It’s just one pair of feet trodding along the path, a solo traveler on a trek through woods that are possessed by the decimated trees. Healing—a thread that ties these pieces together—is a personal journey, something only one person can know. Beylis’ music highlights this peaceful seclusion, encouraging us to dive into our own remembrances and return anew, too.
But perhaps most arresting is “The Roots Of The Mountain Ash Embrace The Stone,” Beylis’ response to spending an afternoon in a sweathouse. The piece evokes the feeling of Panaiotis, Pauline Oliveros, and Stuart Dempster’s Deep Listening in its cavernous embrace. Listening is like closing your eyes and retreating into the recesses of your mind. Maybe while you’re there, a memory will pop back up—with any luck it’ll be as warm as the stones that line the sweathouse, and it’ll invite you to remember the fleeting past for just a second more.