Lowland Hum at The Rialto Theatre
1000 Kenmore Boulevard Akron, Ohio
Thursday, March 28th.
Doors. 7:30pm. Show 8pm.
RSVP to the Facebook event page!
It’s 5:15 in the morning in an historic apartment building in downtown Charlottesville called The Pink Warehouse. Lauren and Daniel Goans, who you will know as the married, world-traveling, singer/songwriting folk duo Lowland Hum, are making their fourth full-length record, Glyphonic, in their studio apartment on the top floor. On top of a bookshelf above the window, there’s a plastic bin collecting black water that drips through a crack in the roof. (Don’t tell Daniel’s mom; we don’t want her to worry.)
The reason the Goanses are awake so early is to track guitars for their new album before the rest of Charlottesville rises. They’ll continue to track throughout the day, taking breaks only by force of noise intrusions: construction, trucks, and the quaking of the entire building as trains pass on the tracks within an arm’s reach of the back stoop. These early morning hours will prove dramatically valuable for the quiet they afford.
People are always walking
across the tracks behind our building;
there’s always the feeling that so much is happening.
If there’s a better image to set the stage for Glyphonic, I can’t imagine it. As the world has continued to grow louder around them, Lowland Hum have spent their career refining the particular power of their self-imposed restraint. Glyphonic is the purest distillation of this thesis to date, setting about the difficult work of finding stillness and meaning in the midst of chaos: a collection of quietudes created and savored among all this present noisiness.
I mean our noisiness, of course, about which plenty has been written, plenty of noise about the noise has been added (An internet search for the term “information overload” will return over 90,400,000 results in .43 seconds). You and me, dear reader, that’s our lot. And we don’t tour roughly 200 days out of the year.