Retrieved from the archives and posted to mark the second anniversary of its release
Mighty winds both external and internal, public and personal, have buffeted Emma Tricca in the years since St. Peter. The journey to Aspirin Sun began prior to the great shut-down, setting out from her own unique loss, its attendant bewilderments, and the memories and emotions provoked. In a creative vortex – at Steve Shelley’s studio in New York, Sean Read’s in London, in a Tuscan farmhouse and a quiet London flat – she would coax to completion a series of songs reflecting and exploring that experience, to both bottle and transcend it.
Aspirin Sun is one serious, ambitious record comprising eight songs spanning just over fifty minutes; initially dizzying in its flight and swirl. Possessed of its own time, marching to its own measure, the listener is invited to join this questing transit in which the restorative power of art is reaffirmed; a working Van Morrison once called ‘the healing game’; progressing from ‘Devotion’s uncertain opening: “I was hungry at heart, I was lost and confused”: to ‘Space And Time’s triumphant liberation: “So my fear of depending goes /And I can see over the mountain top /And I can see over the mountain now”.
At heart a folksinger and wordsmith; her earliest exemplars being the Greenwich Village solo performers Odetta, Joan Baez, protest-Bob circa The Times They Are A-Changin’. While Emma’s journeyed from there she’s retained their lyrical precision, bolstered by a lifelong engagement with poetry since coming upon Italian modernist Ungaretti at the age of nine. Throughout Aspirin Sun the music feeds from the words, and she’s fortunate in having gathered inspirational collaborators with the self-possession to help her achieve this.
Jason Victor has played guitar with Steve Wynn for the last two decades; latterly in the reincarnated Dream Syndicate; while Steve Shelley, having drummed for Sonic Youth, has worked with Michael Rother and Mark Kozelek among many. Bassist Pete Galub is a much-respected New York singer-songwriter. The quartet recorded much of the record at Shelley’s studio, then brass and further backing vocals were added at Sean Read’s Famous Times Studio in Hackney.
Thus elements of folk, blues, the Paisley Underground, Krautrock, New York improv, Italian film soundtrack are all indubitably present, but all as grist to a newly-minted mill. Then her bejewelled voice, clear, graceful, multi-faceted, across the widest spectrum of emotions. The opening ‘Devotion’ is brief but crucial, setting in miniature all that is to come; the gentle piano, the precise yet exposed vocal, and the half-discerned instrumentation like sound from another room. She’s on the street corner waiting to embark on a journey she’s taken many times before, except it can never happen again because the driver is gone, and then there are no words, and the no-words are the most expressive.
‘Devotion’ is a dream; dreams, metaphors, and symbols abound surrounded by music that continually morphs and shape-shifts, often running ahead and remaining after the singing has ended. ‘Christadora House’ is a real; a sixteen story settlement house standing on the edge of Tompkins Square Park but it’s also part of her family history. What starts as a meditation on the concrete: “there is something comforting in the geometric shape”: becomes insubstantial as “you call your father’s name”, and gradually untethers in similar fashion to her great-uncle who painted it in 1934.
‘Autumn’s Fiery Tongue’ begins gently with guitar before the arrival of percussive footsteps whose urgency mirrors the uncertainty of the new season; that season present in the domestic vision of ‘Leaves’ a vulnerably-voiced sound painting climaxing in a poet’s solipsism: “if we leave the city now… the trees will have no name to be called by”. A contrasting lightness then walks through the door with the dancing braggadocio of ‘King Blixa’.
Blixa’s regal prowl is prelude to the epic epiphanies of ‘Rubens’ House’. A work of magic and grandeur from a place of rich decoration – “in Rubens’ House the walls are not bare” – overwhelming in its dazzle and brightness, before in a glorious instant of realignment she appears inside the very paintings, companioning “birds of prey in the garden of Eden” and “the ladies all dressed in their silk finery”. The song will duly flower with layerings of voice, a veritable chorale, before streaming light-wards in a thrilling kosmische cascade.
‘Through The Poet’s Eyes’ and ‘Space And Time’ present further incantatory celebrations of creativity and new beginning. The former initially simple and stark, expanding and enlarging as its reiterations summon a day into being, climaxing with trumpet. A trumpet returning with the crowd of voices and enlarging confidence of ‘Space And Time’ as fear dissolves and “I can see over” repeats.
The surety of Aspirin Sun’s construction and organisation, along with its compelling, hypnotic auras, mark its singularity. Time alone will determine its place in the pantheon, though very high would be a good wager; what’s certain now is it will always offer fresh ways to listen and new insights to glean.
Aspirin Sun was released by Bella Union in April 2023; you can purchase it here.
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