First Fire / At Dawn

For the last decade, musician/composer/sound artist John Kolodij has wandered through passages of darkness and light as High aura’d. In his multi-instrumental practice, he has utilized guitar, field recordings, shortwave radio, and various electronics, reshaping the sounds into both gnarled, heavy motifs and gentle fields of reassurance and peace. First Fire/At Dawn finds Kolodij operating at full power on both ends of that spectrum, sharing two side-long excursions that swell beyond all rational capabilities to explore moments of all-encompassing sorrow, soft reflection, and perpetual gratitude for all of it.

Originally issued on cassette by Astral Spirits/Astral Editions in 2020, First Fire/At Dawn was swallowed somewhat by the limited availability of its initial run, as well as the dysregulating year it arrived in. The material here is some of the deepest and more complex in Kolodij’s catalog, and the considerately mastered vinyl format brings clearer detail to the sonic picture.

The first half of the album, “First Fire,” is a burning star in a bottomless night, with uneasy swells of synth, burnished guitar, and caustic noise that all grow into a tumbling blaze. Far too emotionally connected to be minimized as “ambient,” this dynamic solo piece bends and writhes with the same kind of fire that fueled Jefre Cantu Ledesma’s most powerful shoegaze abstraction phases circa Love Is A Stream, while also connecting to threads of identity shared with the American noise underground and the Midwestern freak scene of improvisers that Kolodij has long been a member of.

“At Dawn” is a different scene in the same slow-paced film, unfolding from blurbling field recordings and spartan banjo figures to include Smithsonian Folkways artist Anna RG on fiddle and composer/musicologist Sarah Hennies on percussion. It transmogrifies the simmer of the preceding piece into a deceptively staid front porch traditionalism, but dread waits beneath the surface as the sun gradually burns off the morning dew. Taken in sections, or as a pair, the two hemispheres of First Fire/At Dawn are quietly restless, full of a type of mourning that can only obscure itself for so long.