How to Find My Way Home
Released by Rusted Tone Recordings, Heavy Cloud’s new album is a sonic journey exploring the four different types of memory
How to Find My Way Home is a personal sonic journey exploring the four different types of memory, via drones and electronics, field recordings, found sounds and audio collage.
When we record a memory, and attempt to revisit it, our minds go through a process: receive > encode > store > retrieve. Difficulties in memory can be caused by something going wrong at any point of these stages.
Sensory memory: a very brief recall of a sensory experience, such as what we just saw or heard. A snapshot of what we just experienced that quickly disappears.
Short-term memory: that brief period of time where we can recall information we were just exposed to.
Working memory: can be defined as the ability of our brains to keep a limited amount of information available long enough to use it. Working memory helps process thoughts and plans, as well as carry out ideas.
Long-term memory: encompasses memories that range from a few days to decades. In order for successful learning to take place, information has to move from the sensory or the short-term memory to the long-term memory.
This musical project by Heavy Cloud is interested in how these types of memory can begin to fade, erode and become mistrustful over time.
How to Find My Way Home is series of connecting spaces where memories excavate and reanimate the past, making the present feel vulnerable. It seeks to contemplate our sense of belonging and debt to the past.
The album is a conduit for the interior world of ‘the Listener’ — a conceptual figure whose phantom memories haunt the tracks and where one or more of these four memory types begin to run off kilter. Notice how the album begins with ‘Long-term Memory’ and runs through the memory process in an illogic order. Time and memory has become mistrustful in this music. Timelines have mixed and maybe even began to misremember, too.
Across the five tracks, aural memories of the Listener can be heard to run in both linear and circular patterns. There are several sections or motifs which repeat throughout the 42 minutes and others that begin and never seem to finish. Some get cut off abruptly and are followed by passages of near silence. There are flashbacks to previous sounds and repetition of phrases; although these may reappear changed ever so slightly having shifted from the previous recall, showing us that the Listener’s memories are not rigidly recorded — they are flexible, living ghosts that can move and shapeshift.
How to Find My Way Home has many textural layers and voices woven within its tapestry. Some musical episodes were freshly created for the project and some are reworked from Heavy Cloud’s own memory bank. While other soundscapes have infiltrated the Listener’s collected consciousness from other sources — the radio, gramophone records, voice memo recordings, collated field recordings, extracts from cinema and television. At times, there are hints of realisation for the Listener that these experiences and memories are shifting and talking to each other, like hyperlinks across the web or trees communicating via mycorrhizal networks. At other times, there is perhaps a sense of loss and isolation.
What lies below is a track-by-track breakdown of the five pieces found on How to Find My Way Home. This can be read before, during or after listening to the album. Or not at all. These are not the thoughts of the Listener after all, merely the author, who in this case has taken a backseat to let the Listener’s memories unravel to give them a chance to find their way home.
1. Long-term Memory
The opening track is the longest of the album and begins with static hanging heavy in the air. It is soon accompanied by a melody from the past played on a gramophone (from a children’s music education series) that enters the frame. This melody could be called the genesis memory of the album, one I like to call the ‘home line’ for the Listener.
What follows is a series of episodic events that cycle and evolve as one long-term memory begins, before triggering another, which may or may not be connected to the previous one.
After the home line disappears, certain elements play out that sound texturally heavy, even sludgy at times. The previous sweet melody has been driven out, as if the Listener is now temporarily treading water in a deep depression, or attempting to push a pathway through mental plaque.
As the memories unravel, shards of melody begin to ping across the stereo field, perhaps indicative of small pockets of clarity, before this is interrupted by a reoccurring sea of cerebral static (taken from an original piece called ‘Tempest’) and then the recall of the next memory.
Throughout ‘Long-term Memory’ there is a sense this is a journey for the Listener — they are trying to think their way back through a fog in order to find a way back to their metaphoric home. Do you catch the quiet whispers of the home line reappearing? Is their idea of ‘home’ somewhere on the horizon? If this piece represents a season, it would be autumn.
The pattern of migrating soundscapes continues until there is a brief, almost silence — perhaps something is beginning to break or fail? — and a regression in the Listener’s isolation. We are left with a lonely, longing synth melody that meanders to and fro, rises and falls, as if searching for the direction to guide the Listener to a cornerstone memory and pathway home. The pieces ends with a twinkling coda that grabs hold onto the tail of optimism.
2. Short-term Memory
This piece is a series of memories spun together through passages called ‘Rainbow Kross’, ‘Devotional’, ‘Left Brain’, ‘Daily Routine’, ‘5/4 Infinity’ and ‘Drifting’.
It begins with a short snatch of a ticking clock, a resurfacing melody and processed guitar, before synth lines share the space with panning static rain and pushes this noise away.
The next phase opens up to a suite of synths and very irregular heartbeat sounds that eventually gets consumed by faraway rumblings that surrounds the Listener to a possible point of claustrophobia. It’s as if the Listener is trying to remember through the fog.
And then, this noise just falls away, the fog clears, and we can hear birdsong and voices (“it’s real!”), laughter, footsteps crunching on gravel— is this an actual memory or a false one? A dream or a snippet of a scene from a film? Is it the last fading memories of a lost summer for the Listener?
3. Sensory Memory
Just like our own sensory memory, this track tries to influence the senses, primarily of course, the ears. It begins with a movement originally called ‘Not Grunge’, an attempt to create a slowed down piece of ambient grunge music using electric guitar and amplifiers. It jolts the Listener (and perhaps us) out of the brief reverie the ending of the previous track afforded us.
After several cycles and recycles this filtered grunge leaves us and left in its trail are small loops of vocal whispers and eerie field recordings. A distorted looping “hello?” speaks and disappears. And then a piano line fragment appears — its new and different to any previous piano we have heard — and seems to accompany the whispers. Shortly after this brief lull, a heavy bricolage of sounds begin to float into the memory, as if we’re travelling through a thick cloud of turbulence on a thread-bare blanket.
Once free of these clouds, the sense of disorientation continues to grow as the Listener travels through passages featuring drones and moaning cries. If the first half of this piece was in part influenced by grunge then the second half was inspired by drone folk and noise artists and includes parts called ‘Echo Canyon’ and ‘The Sprawl’.
Sensory Memory ends with a gentle (re)discovery, in the shape of another simple piano line fragment. The piano appears to be a guiding light through the Listener’s memories; perhaps functioning as part of their keystone memory that guides them forward through what sounds like their winter phase of memories.
4. Working Memory
The last of the memory pieces features synth drones that comes from a series of study material called ‘Melancholia’. Twinkling bells, heard briefly in earlier memories, return, as does the Listener’s ‘home line’ gramophone melody (ever so quietly) and the squelching loop of mental decay — perhaps all hints towards signs of a regression, or a recycle of memories, by the Listener?
Yet, about halfway through, a new melody appears (again accompanied by a sea of static fraying around the edges). Has the Listener passed through bursts of mental fog and found the path to some clarity again? The rising orchestra synth swells suggests movement towards a restful bliss, perhaps even a passing through winter into a hopeful spring. This bliss continues to build, but so does the sea of static, rising and swelling, eventually engulfing the melody.
5. How to Find My Way Home
The album finishes with the title track. If we believe the Listener’s objective was always to try to find their way home, do we think their journey through multiple memories has reached a welcome destination?
This is another track created with different connecting passages. The original collage artwork that features a range of material from book pages, notes, photographs, maps, music sheets and other ephemeral, is a visual echo of this textural and memory interconnectivity.
‘How to Find My Way Home’ begins gently with glimpses of nature sounds and birdsong, as a choral line grows out through an evolving drone. A rattling chain is heard, or perhaps a tug of a door handle. And then solace enters, birds and a choir sing, synths and a harp swells. Maybe we — like the Listener — feel a sense of spring, of renewal? How to Find My Way Home — the track and the album — comes to a close with the most hopeful melody of the release.
Has the Listener found their way home?
I would like to think so.
How to Find My Way Home by Heavy Cloud is out now on cassette and digital download from Rusted Tone Recordings.
