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His Name is Alive

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His Name is Alive, “Hope is a Candle” (Disciples, 2021)

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Disciples’ wonderful series of resurrected home recordings from Warren Defever’s precocious teenage years winds to a close with this third album (coinciding with the release of A Silver Thread, which compiles all of Defever’s recently issued early home recordings in one place). In one way, it can be said that the best was saved for last, as Hope is a Candle features remastered versions of some material from the demo that fatefully landed His Name is Alive on 4AD (which has circulated as a bootleg for years). 

To my ears, however, it does not quite rival the pleasures of All the Mirrors in the House, but that makes sense since Mirrors was the revelatory bombshell that unveiled this treasure trove in the first place. That said, the “songs” are sometimes a bit longer and more fleshed out this time around, making Hope is a Candle feel like an enjoyable outtakes collection from the project’s earliest albums. While that is certainly enough to satisfy me as an HNIA fan, the album also boasts quite a lovely and sublime closing piece.

Now that this wonderful series of archival finds is (probably) at an end, it occurs to me that its appeal often lies more in hearing what a bored teenager with limited resources can achieve with sufficient vision than as a window into how the early His Name is Alive aesthetic took shape. After all, there are already several great HNIA albums out in the world, but getting a glimpse into how the young and extremely resourceful Defever worked around his limitations is considerably more instructive and inspiring. As Defever himself put it, “I wanted to do my own Music For 18 Musicians. But I didn’t know 18 musicians; I barely had two friends, and even they couldn’t stand me.” 

While nothing on Hope is a Candle is in any danger of being mistaken for a classic Steve Reich composition, the album does feature an impressively varied and inventive series of song sketches. The strongest is the aforementioned closer, “Insiders,” which is a warmly lovely and slow-moving procession of shimmering chord swells. “Liadin,” the album’s single of sorts, is a gem as well, as Defever deftly combines slow, chorus-heavy washes of chords with airy, jangling strums. Elsewhere, the swirling, reverb-swathed orchestral loops of “Nearby” are another sublime delight. 

That said, while Hope is a Candle does feature some song-like moments, it still does not quite reach the “songs” stage, so it has the feel of a collection of ephemeral highlights plucked from a mountain of improvisations (which is exactly what it is). At various times throughout this series, some unearthed pieces have transcended those origins beautifully, but the bulk of this album falls more within the “cool vignettes” category. Some of those vignettes ARE quite good though, particularly the all-too-brief harmonized acoustic guitar interlude of “Never” and the droning bowed strings and sharp harmonics of “Still.”

Samples can be found here.

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His Name is Alive, “Return to Never (Home Recordings 1979 – 1986 Vol 2)” (Disciples, 2020)

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The first foray into Warren Defever’s teenage tape archive (last year’s All The Mirrors in the House) was an absolute revelation that actively courted disbelief, but this second installment is a bit more modest in its scope. As a result, Return To Never unavoidably feels a bit underwhelming and insubstantial by comparison, but it is still a likable album that scratches roughly the same itch, as I am very much a fan of Defever’s homespun, early lo-fi experiments. While there are still a healthy number of melodic guitar pieces strewn throughout the album, Return to Never is generally a more experimental and abstract affair than the previous volume. 

Phrases like “analogue murk” and “greyscale industrial drone” are tossed around in the album’s description and they are fairly apt: if All The Mirrors captured a teenage Defever accidentally inventing shoegaze, Return to Never captures him accidentally mirroring the sounds of the early ’80s noise underground (or at least calls to mind someone playing shoegaze-style guitar over such a tape). The warmer, more “ambient” passages still tend to be the best ones, but if some moments from Return to Never had found their way onto an early Broken Flag tape, I doubt anyone would have blinked or raised an eyebrow.

In Dominic Foster’s haunting and beautiful short promotional video for Return to Never, the album is described as the work of a “compulsive 13-year-old with no social life” that has now been “blended together with an adult hand.” Such a description could certainly apply to All the Mirrors in the House as well, but it definitely feels quite a bit more believable this time around, as most of these pieces plausibly sound like the cooler excerpts culled from hours and hours of precocious experimentation with effects and field recording. Consequently, I do not at all envy Shelley Salant for being the one who had to listen to all of the indulgent juvenilia that must have surrounded the gems that ultimately wound up on this album. 

I am quite curious about what the original context was for some of the briefer pieces though. For example, the gorgeously quivering shimmer of “Chords” only lasts about thirty seconds, which makes me wonder what happened to the rest of the piece and how badly it must have derailed to leave behind such a brief snatch of beauty once the editing was complete. I feel similarly about the album’s most improbable piece, “From The Night Tape,” which feels both fully formed and years ahead of its time: a blown-out bass thrum and out-of-phase, backwards high hats propel a swirling miasma of shoegaze guitars for roughly thirty seconds and then it all vanishes abruptly. 

Obviously, the perplexing brevity of some of the album’s strongest pieces creates some enticing mysteries, yet “Night Tape” goes one step further in making me wonder why such an immediately gratifying and cool aesthetic was not explored further or revisited: there are fourteen other songs on the album, yet none of them flirt with beats or grooves again. My guess is that “Night Tape” was either a newly assembled collage of multiple pieces or that it immediately predated the blossoming of His Name is Alive into a more song-based project.

For the most part, however, Return to Never is devoted to a series of atmospheric vignettes that bounce between dreamlike guitar soundscapes and hiss-soaked field recordings of crashing waves and heavy machinery. Both sides have their merits, of course, but the album’s more melodic pieces are definitely the ones that play more to Defever’s strengths. The best of the lot is the swooning “To Remember,” which takes a woozily lovely, seesawing loop and ravages it with sputtering snarls of static. 

The shimmering and chiming drift of “Guitar Echo” is quite nice as well (albeit a bit unformed/improvisatory by comparison). There are also a handful of pieces that combine gently swaying soft-focus guitar drones with primitive sound collage, though the inherent hiss and murk of recording on a boombox tends to overpower the nuances of the latter. Still, some are quite good, such as the lovely and meditative title piece, which is slowly eclipsed by crashing waves that segue into the similarly fine “Lake Night.”

“My Thoughts to Thee are Drawn” is another sublime treat, as languorous, hazy strings drift over something that sounds like a field recording of a passing train heard from underwater. The album also features a pair of unexpected and abrasive surprises at the end in the form of “White Snake” and “Gone.” Neither is particularly substantial, sadly, yet both share an endearing “anything goes” sense of gleeful derangement. In the former, a rock frontman asks a cheering crowd how many of them are going to see Whitesnake that weekend before the piece plunges into a simmering maelstrom of buzzing, pulsing, and crackling noise. That cacophony then segues into a half-gnarled/half-anthemic piece that calls to mind a Jesus and Mary Chain gig in which all of the band’s amplifiers explode as soon as they launch into their first song, leaving only a muscular bass line in a squall of harsh feedback and howling noise.

My only real grievance with Return to Never is that “To Remember” is the only piece that feels like a strong, stand-alone “single.” Obviously, that is somewhat unavoidable given the nature of this collection, but All the Mirrors in the House managed to pull off the illusion of being a substantial, deliberate, and thematically focused whole anyway. I imagine that is an incredibly hard trick to repeat though and Defever admittedly does a fine job editing these disparate sketches together into something that flows quite well . In fact, it could be argued that he actually did quite an amazing job of curating and editing these pieces, as this album has distinct “winter” feel that is very different from its more autumnal and sun-dappled predecessor. Maybe this album is every bit as good as Mirrors and I just do not like winter as much as I like fall. Or maybe I am projecting all of this. Anything is possible. 

Only Defever knows what his intentions were, of course, but Return to Never does feel like its own statement rather than a lesser version of Mirrors. Mike McGonigal is not far from the mark when he claims in the liner notes that all of these pieces would probably be considered “lost classics of modern minimalism” if they could be stretched and expanded to fill a whole side of vinyl .I only take issue with the “all” part of that statement, as I probably would have loved this album if two or three of its best pieces had been stretched out for 10 of 15 minutes each. Alas. 

Given all of my unanswered questions and unmet aspirations for this album, I am very curious to see what the next (and final) installment of this series will be like, as it will clarify once and for all whether or not Mirrors got the lion’s share of teenage Defever’s best moments or if he still has a mountain of great unreleased material that he is merely categorizing by mood. In any case, I enjoy Return to Never, but it is not quite on the same level as previous bombshell compilations like King of Sweet or Mirrors, as Defever has set a very high bar for how truly wonderful his vault scraping can be.

Samples can be found here.

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His Name is Alive, “All The Mirrors in the House (Early Recordings 1979 – 1986)” (Disciples, 2019)

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As befits the curious and unpredictable arc of His Name is Alive, this first installment of a planned trilogy of Warren Defever’s adolescent/teenage tape experiments is a truly wonderful and bewildering revelation. Defever must have been one hell of a precocious 10-year-old back in 1979, as his formula of combining field recordings, copious reverb, and samples of records played at the wrong speeds would have easily been strong enough to build an entire career on—I daresay it was a positively Basinski-esque flash of inspiration. Instead, however, Defever opted to move onto more song-based work and this side of his artistry was relegated to some dusty, long-forgotten boxes, which I suppose worked out quite well too. 

These lovely, haunted sounding soundscapes would have made quite a huge impression if they had been released during the band’s 4AD heyday though: the liner notes amusingly suggest that Defever accidentally invented shoegaze while trying to make new age music. Fortunately, these elegantly blurred miniatures still sound absolutely wonderful today, even if the window has passed in which Defever might have been hailed as one of the most important and influential voices in ambient music (or as a proto-Slowdive shoegaze savant).

To a large degree, All The Mirrors in the House sounds much too good to be true, as it is hard to wrap my mind around the fact that some kid in Michigan was making better ambient music than Brian Eno in the early ’80s. That caveat will likely appear in every single review of this album and for good reason (there is even a healthy degree of disbelief expressed in Mike McGonigal’s liner notes). Warren Defever has been a willfully mischievous and unreliable narrator at times and it is not unreasonable to think that there is some deliberate myth-building behind this release. If there was, it certainly worked on me, as I was very eager to hear it. 

According to Defever, however, the only post-production magic worked upon these recordings was “the overlapping of the songs for flow” (though he also notes “I really can’t remember how any of it was made, or exactly when.”). By any measure, these songs sound improbably and suspiciously clean and contemporary. And it is damn hard to imagine a pre-teen with a guitar sampler and a boombox anticipating the evolution of underground music by years, much less doing it this skillfully. Still, I would not put it past a teenage Defever to genuinely have been this advanced at manipulating recordings, as he is a legitimate studio visionary and that did not simply happen overnight. Also, limited resources tend to inspire innovative methods. Anything is possible, I guess. In all likelihood, Defever’s backstory is probably at least true in spirit, as this album does not bear much resemblance to any of Defever’s other recent releases. Also, the stylistic leap from these pieces to the earliest HNIA albums is not a improbably huge one.

It would probably be apt to say that this album is the result of three perfect sets of circumstances spanning more than three decades and could not exist if any one piece to did come together just right. The first, obviously, is that Defever acquired a tape recorder and began ingeniously misusing it immediately. The second is that he grew up in a religious household, so the record collection that he was raiding for his sound collages was an eclectic array of “folksongs, polkas, and waltzes.” Most other kids with Defever’s passion probably would have just borrowed their older brother’s Zeppelin and Sabbath albums and devoted themselves to starting a rock band, but that was simply not an option here and necessity is the mother of invention. Fatefully, Defever also stumbled upon a CBC show in the mid-80s (Brave New Waves) that awakened his ears to fringe-dwellers like Psychic TV, so he certainly had a host of eclectic influences rewiring his brain during those years.

The final key puzzle piece is that the adult Warren Defever is singularly adept at assembling compelling and gorgeously hallucinatory album-length collages of short vignettes (1992’s Home is in Your Head being easily one of my favorite HNIA albums). Also of note: Defever had some curatorial assistance from Tyvek’s Shelley Salant, which likely played an indispensable role in distilling only the most sublime moments from the dozens of old tapes (he instructed her to specifically search for anything that was “new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars”). Defever also jokingly suggested that McGonigal use lots of adjectives taken from Slowdive’s wikipedia page in order to appeal to today’s kids.

Significantly, Defever’s distance from these recordings enabled him to have the perspective necessary for shaping them into such a deliberate and fully-formed vision. There are probably many different directions that this collection could have gone, but he chose to present these years as something beautiful, ghostly, and bittersweetly dreamlike (an aesthetic that is even more pronounced in the album’s eerie trailer). 

While these fifteen pieces amount to quite a mesmerizing and emotionally resonant whole, there is a purity and simplicity to the individual pieces that makes their purported provenance seem arguably plausible: each piece seems to be built on just a single theme and some reverb (though Defever purportedly mimicked multitracking with strategically placed boomboxes). For example, “Because Piano” seems totally believable as a bit of Defever’s juvenilia, as it is just a minor key piano melody layered and reverb-ed into a lushly wobbly soundscape.”Tape Slow” achieves a similar feat, as it is impossible to tell what the raw material behind the shivering, smeared reverie possibly could have been (tape experimentation at its finest).

Some of the other pieces are much harder to swallow as authentic remnants from the ’80s though, particularly “Liadin” and the closing “F Choir.” Both are swooning, shimmering, and angelically beautiful miniature masterpieces.In fact, the latter approximates an Arvo Pärt piece remixed by someone like Tim Hecker. The shuffling and hypnagogic groove of “Outside The Window” is similarly striking—it is only a mere thirty seconds long, but it sounds like it could have been plucked from a cutting-edge dub album released this year. Yet another highlight is “Something About Hope,” which masterfully intertwines looping guitars to approximate something that could have been a stand-out on 1993’s Mouth By Mouth.

While I cannot shake my skepticism about the veracity of the album’s backstory and timeline, it genuinely delights me to think about a young Warren Defever gleefully deconstructing polkas and making beatscapes out of his neighbor shoveling the driveway. Ultimately, however, how and when Defever made these recordings is far less important than the fact that All The Mirrors In The House is a legitimately wonderful album that reminds me exactly why I grew to love His Name Is Alive in the first place. While it is always interesting and unique, Defever’s output in recent years has been increasingly inscrutable, prickly, and prone to excess (or at least to outsized ambitions).

As such, an understated, intimate, and quietly beautiful album like this one is hugely welcome. All The Mirrors in the House is a flawlessly crafted release and Defever’s curatorial and sequencing instincts were unerring: there are many truly wonderful pieces here and they all flow together seamlessly in an immersive and poignant spell that never breaks or wavers. In fact, I actually wish this album was longer, as it goes by so quickly that I find myself immediately restarting it as soon as it ends. Not many albums have that effect on me these days. Happily, I will likely get my wish when the rest of this trilogy eventually surfaces, but for now All The Mirrors in the House has definitively joined the ranks of Defever’s strongest and most distinctive albums.

Samples can be found here.