Slow Blink : Letters Home

Nostalgia and memory go hand in hand. Not all memories equate to nostalgia, but the best ones do. When the present isn’t currently offering some sort of contentment – as is the case with where we are right now in history – we seek better times locked away in the past. Trips to small town amusement parks as a child for miniature golf and a ride on the Wild Cat, or a particularly cozy Christmas morning where family was together, happy, and the joy was ever present. Even a particular sunset overlooking Lake Michigan, hand in hand with someone you you’d give up everything for. These are the things we seek when the world feels particularly unkind.

Amanda Haswell, aka Slow Blink, works in sounds seemingly conjured from the tatters of time. Looping melodies, meditative and rhythmic in repetition, and feeling as if it was pulled from the subconscious. Her debut release with the great Past Inside The Present, Letters Home, has a hazy, dreamy quality. Building looping sounds from bowed guitars, piano, bells, recorder, and toy synthesizers and letting the loops play out in an almost hypnotic way, Haswell has created visceral sonic worlds. Two songs that each cover a cassette side, Letters Home is a powerful, fully engaged experience.

There are a lot of people that thanks to a society with attention spans neutered by Reels, binge-watching, and fast food right to your door thanks to Door Dash, will not be able to lock in to Letters Home. It’s a refined, thoughtful, and emotional experience that’s not the typical serotonin hit to the frontal lobe. This is an album that works its magic in meditative waves and thoughtful curiosity. And each side of this cassette release offers their own hits of sonic magic.

“The Heart’s Docent” opens in bell-like chimes that seem to announce our departure into this fuzzy, disintegrating sound world. Like a great, massive answer to some ancient question hits your brain while still asleep. It begins to go from clear and concise to something hazy in the distance as you rise from sleep into lucidity. By the time you’re awake there’s only bits and pieces of that answer which remain. And those feel more like hazy memories, now merely puzzle pieces for you to attempt to put back together.

“Laughter At Cascade Park” comes from a very personal place for Amanda Haswell. Cascade Park was an amusement park located in New Castle, Pennsylvania where her grandparents would go. It was a destination spoken very highly of, offering a place for families to create memories together. Haswell explains further, “Cascade Park was a destination for people to gather, have fun, and go on dates… The stories I heard throughout my youth made it seem so idyllic, and I wanted to capture that particular mixture of ecstasy and unease.”

You get the feeling of a warm, summer day as the sun disappears behind a wooded Pennsylvania horizon. The lights of the carousel, rollercoasters, and the Midway are all that light this idyllic and gauzy experience. Sounds that seem to decay before your ears, distant bells and hazy piano give the mirage of a time long ago that is stuck between the present and past. A portal to a simpler moment. There were no simpler times per say, just meditative moments within that time. This song is a sephia-toned love letter to those moments.

Letters Home elicits everything from William Basinski to Sparklehorse to Midi Janitor to Windy & Carl, to name a few. But Slow Blink sits in a musical world all its own. Letters Home is a meditative, dreamy, and melancholy sound world. A portal to another time and place; a window into the heart’s memory.

‘Letters Home’ will be released 9/24 via Past Inside The Present.