June McDoom - Follow The Light (LP)

Liminal space – We all know it, a familiar friend. The haze we slip into on our way to sleep. That warmth on your eyelids you feel when you turn your face to the sun and drift out of time for a few minutes. Those moments of stillness that belong to you in the sacred minutes before the alarm goes off, before you are fully able to acknowledge the outside world that waits on you like some hungry panther, eyeing you from strange trees. Inhabiting this zone is a luxury, but the best sort of liminality lives in a very specific dream space, one we spend the rest of our lives chasing: The deep sleep that most children know. Somewhere between familiar household sounds and being carried to your own bed, there’s the quiet that only belongs to you and some dream self – someone that you haven’t met yet, but that you make future plans for and secret promises to. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, feels exactly like exploring this space and pushing forward, slipping out of time and waking up someplace new, a place that’s barely familiar enough to feel like home but somehow already wholly personal and meant for you alone. June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound all his own, built his own speakers and maintained no less than three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, making itself at home like some wayward cat as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. On the edge of the Florida Everglades, two musics in one room, meshing into something indescribable. Lushness as past and premonition. The low end of where she comes from, and the high, gentle harmony of what she would eventually seek out, sharing the same humid air. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate, all the while nobody around her listening to it and her parents referring to it as “that sleepy music.” She did not mind being the only one; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else. Harmony is the thing that reaches her, and now it is the thing she effortlessly reaches for. You will hear it all over this album, with chords opening up to greet you before you have any idea what she’s singing about. Yet and still, an elder also traveled a similar path: Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of all of it – we have the form to thank for ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of. An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own. For years, this was just the sound of her family, a comfort and constant companion that did not yet feel as if it also belonged to her. It took going out into the world, living, loving, learning and coming back home, to find that she had earnestly built a full life of her own – and that there was a sound to meet it. She put on an Alton Ellis record one day and realized the soundshe had been seeking had been there her whole life, a steady groove meant to hold anyone with ears and heart enough to listen. She set out to create and ended up making music that held space for all of the sounds and feelings that she loved. Not a reggae or dub record, not a folk record, but the harmony of one laid over the rhythm of the other. Sonic liminality, echoed out into the cosmos in some places. She and her longtime partner, Evan Wright, created the songs slowly, by hand. Songcraft for the pair meant stacking parts over time, chasing texture, exercising restraint in their explorations, keeping things minimal on purpose. Nearly every one began as just her voice and a guitar before the two of them fleshed it out, Evan playing most of the instruments while June layered in the vocal harmonies she so loves to arrange. They opened the record by cutting live drums with Victor Axelrod, the producer who records as Ticklah, down in his Sunset Park basement, then carried the songs home and built the rest themselves across long days in the studio they keep at home, tracking to tape and digital both, even hauling out to a friend’s house for the harp. Dub and Wall of Sound influencing the low end, with echoes of Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washy, stellar guitars of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand haunting the outer edges of what her sound would shapeshift into. Angelic heroics, and nothing less. It was not easy, by any stretch. A casual listener won’t know that she spent twelve hours a day mixing because she wanted perfection, or that she started the process over when, on a Christmas visit, her parents told her that they couldn’t hear enough of her vocals. “Without You,” the album’s lead single, carries the fingerprints of that patience: it began with live drums running straight through and slowly became something else entirely, the deeper she steeped it in Cocteau Twins, until a dub bassline and a shoegaze shimmer met in the middle, in the last place you would think to look for either one. That was the standard she wanted to meet and surpass – but you, listener, will only hear a record that could have gone overboard but didn’t. Generous in its way, it invites you in as an active participant on the path, leaving room for you instead of telling you how to feel. At the heart, the core of all of this, is June’s grandmother Aggie. She formed the center, both in family and in this recording – a guide for June in moments of stillness, in moments of uncertainty, and at the edges that she wants to keep close. Indeed, the song “Memory” was written with her in mind. That is the light making its way through the pinhole in this camera of the mind, the guide that helps June to focus, to see and to step forward confidently. People who love you showing the way, their energy still present and shining even when their form has moved on. There’s a harder, quieter undercurrent that moves through this album – one that June explores in “Outside the Window.” There are so many different iterations of a self, all belonging to so many different sets of people and realities. What obligation do you have to them, and can you meet all of the promises that you made to yourself in those sleepy, hazy moments when you pretended you weren’t a kid anymore? What is authenticity? Who defines that? Who do you owe it to? What do you owe yourself? These are questions that prowl around the corners of the overthinking artist’s mind when creating an album this intimate, this exacting, this personal. You’re learning how to be a person in public while keeping a degree of interiority all of your own, trying to make sure that you don’t let your life pass you by as you’re trying to meet your own standards. Future You is an ancestor that your current self gets to meet. As June layers these songs, she is figuring out who she is in real time. The album holds that answer, and offers it to you, the listener, as well. It knows that none of us are just one person, but a multitude of people we’ve had to let go of, kill off, commit to meeting at a future date and time. A continuum: There’s an entire lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here. A collection of people and things that don’t seem to go together, but we let them in anyway. Dark. Light. Equals. Opposites. All there in sound, in spirit, in daily action. We turn into the light when things feel dark. We get used to feeling around for it if we can’t see it. We let the warmth of it hit our faces and slowly open eyes to see.