Gretchen Korsmo – Silhouettes, Spires (2024)

Full Spectrum Records presents Gretchen Korsmo’s long awaited full-length debut: ‘Silhouettes, Spires.’

Recorded in a state of transition between her long-time home in Littlefield, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico, this music presents an expansive tapestry of family mythologies, symbolic resonance, and spiritual wayfinding.

After receiving her grandfather’s sailing logs from the 1960s and ‘70s, Korsmo began reckoning with a unique period of personal upheaval and her relationship to her own creative practice. The logs provided a direct connection to the artistic and intellectual people in her family who came before, a familiar reflection within which she might come to find herself more deeply, as well as a rich source for plundering lyrical structures.

Recorded throughout 2023 at both the Wind Tide studio – with engineering support from Andrew Weathers – and her new home and workspace in New Mexico, ‘Silhouettes, Spires’ channels the searching energy Korsmo felt at the time. Over the course of its four tracks, she engages an intuitive approach to composition that exudes a deep sense of presence and a wide-open spaciousness, anchoring the tonal palette around recordings made with her childhood piano, with vocals, shruti box, reed instruments, and Rhodes piano rounding out the soundscape.

Taken in context, ‘Silhouettes, Spires’ functions as a full-throated declaration that you’re never truly lost at sea, so long as you know where your North Star lies.