“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”under the moth moniker, Jon Dale's occasional sonic missives have been collectively described by one commentator as an "incredibly haunting, rich dronescape." certainly, Jon is pretty much an honorary New Zealander when it comes to evoking the kinds of beautiful isolationism one might normally associate with an everyday familiarity with South Island landscapes, and one of the most assiduous and eloquent writers on that particular experimental idiom to be found anywhere.
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
staying for a week in Jon's apartment in Brunswick, Melbourne c.2011, resulted in this. we called it "at home" because that's where it was recorded.
Indeed, the small spaces of domestic life are very present in the piece. the fate of this apartment, now no longer Jon's home, and sadly since gentrified toward 21st century neo-liberal blandness, uncannily echoes that of the home I lived in at the time - the first place I'd called home in over five years, very much my childhood dream-house in Bachelardian vein, as well as the solid structural frame around history and memory which made the destabilisingly destructive anxieties of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake bearable. This was the 1903 mansion Threave in Dunedin, its bay window blurrily visible in the photo of the cover art here - a weight of air and light and listening also now lost to the expedient whims of "development."
So "at home" might be readable as something of a meditation on these spaces, and transience, small and impermanent comforts, stray signals, locality, finding space for listening, wandering thoughts only possible in silence, the remembered atmospheres of introverted, solitary rooms. in this regard, something about the piece reminds me of the final track on one under-appreciated masterpiece of the Dunedin home-recording aesthetic, Nigel Bunn's 1999 album Index, a seeming-afterthought to the song structures elsewhere on the album, called "this day at home." The track is a field recording of gently falling rain out the window of an old Dunedin warehouse, Nigel's home at the time; a capturing of one afternoon, a moment in a life - now also lost: the building has been demolished, its site turned into a carpark. But in the meditative, slow space within the sound of the recording, the building's memory, all the lives it once contained, seem still extant, endlessly circling in the aether.
for moth/cegeste, there is talk of a record. in the meantime, you can download "at home" for free from the bandcamp link above.
