The Bandcamp page for Dissection Maps, the third album from Vermont-based ambient Americana collective Old Saw, has this incredible poem from St. Louis sculptor, photographer, and writer Aidan Patrick Welby, which seems to be unpublished anywhere else. It's got really stunning and breathtaking lines in it, particularly "Earth is the eighth morning, folded against the week's work," and "America is a quarry in the image of God." It gave me something to ponder, and a new made-up word to mull over as I began the album: "choreo-cartographic." The implication of the word is the moving of the people; choreo means dance, and cartography being the study of how to draw a map. It's the kind of image that Sleeps With Dice, the first track on Dissection Maps, is looking to evoke. Far from the sticky, sweaty, yet ultimately refreshing, calm, and serene summer heat of 2021's Country Tropics, Sleeps With Dice incorporates more of the sounds of what we know today as American primitivism, started in the late 50s by guitarist John Fahey. Old Saw specifically leans into one of American primitivism's most distinct influences: the raga structure and musical theory of Hindustani classical music. Now, the term primitivism is ethnocentrically skewed—I wonder what cultures and art Europeans and Americans considered "primitive" back when the term first gained a foothold in the art world!—so it would probably still make sense if I construed instead that the music is without restriction in the way it is played and composed. Primitive in a strictly historical way, not in a racially insensitive way. Aspects of the banjo and guitars on this album almost feel like free folk in a way, not adhering to any pattern but just feeling, merging with the sounds around it to create a soundscape that feels still. You're sitting on the porch on a hot summer's day, and the droning tones of Singing Loom are the sticky, just barely comfortable heat. Every other sound—the clinking of objects, the sound of birdsong—are just the everyday sounds around you as you literally bask in the experience.
It is, decidedly, not as serene an album as Country Tropics was. There is a weight to it, some strange ominosity in the way its elements come together, a microtonal clashing that implies something a tad…darker under the surface. Something like Dealt in Silver, for example, with guitar strings plucked rapid-fire, quietly in the background to give the impression of chimes blowing in the wind, while the desert-like, low, and distorted buzz of guitars and bass drives it forward with grim determination. It's here that I thought back to the last line of Welby's poem: "America is a quarry in the image of God." I think of native Americans and manifest destiny and the ways in which such ideals, driven by religious and racist notions of who deserved what, forced Indians off the lands that were rightfully theirs. How maps are drawn, dissected; pens dancing across paper to mark borders, landmarks, rivers, and names that were not there before. I think, most prominently, of every 4th of July parade I've been to.
Really, this whole album is a July album. Like sweat, the label sticks to the album's body, coating it in a layer of grime and dirt. It gets hotter and hotter, and people drive by in vintage Chevrolets and Ford Model Ts, American flags are flown with pride, and I sit at the edge of the street, watching everything march by, thinking that this is the sweat of the people that died so the white man could have what he believed was rightfully his. I blink, and the tape-manipulation drones of Last Rings twist and distort the image into that of Cherokees and Choctaws and Muscogees and Seminoles, forced off their homelands into a death march into the newly-established Oklahoma territory. I think, "This is what they died for," and the grime and dirt cling tighter, the people parading past in white shirts with American flags. This is what dissecting a map is. It's dissecting the body of America, digging out the native population, and relocating them. White settlers believed that God intended for them to expand across the North American continent, so they turned America into a quarry to dig out the land, the people, for their own gain. And it, ultimately, is in the image of God. And if the recent protests against the Dakota Access pipeline are indicative of anything, it is that this quarry is still very active.
But maybe I'm looking into it too hard. Maybe it doesn't mean all that much, and I've just let my thoughts get away from me on this album. You could read it, truthfully, as another great folk-Americana-ambient album that plays with decay, deals with more ominous tones and aesthetics than before. Still, though, I am compelled by the addition of the Welby poem to the Bandcamp page. If it had no relevance to the album, why would it be there? If this was not meant to be dissected, mapped out to highlight every possible angle, then what the hell is even the point? Ultimately, though, it's an opinion, an analysis you can discard. I do not claim to be an expert on any of the intricacies of American colonialism or primitivism, and I, admittedly, see little point in doing the research and going all out for an album that's only half an hour long. Without any of this context, it remains a stellar album with a lot going for it, and a worthy addition to my ambient repertoire. If you thought ambient music was meant strictly for sleeping or relaxing, listen to this and let it sweep you up. This is ambient for the summer.