Winds Gate by John Thayer

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two, my life flows.
-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Tear of the Clouds, this is how the current swath of settlers refer to the highest lake of origin, the river’s headwater. The 314-mile vein of water that runs along the eastern north/south quadrant of New York State begins here, eroding riverbeds through mountain ranges and waterside towns. Curiously, due to the confluence of tides, salt, and current this river is also partially an estuary, periodically sending flow back northward. And before the colonizers arrived, before the Erie Canal was built, the people in its valley called it never still, the water that moves both ways. And before them? The stone sentinels of Storm King and Breakneck Ridge kept watch long before our dawn. And still the river and the rocks leap sublimely from 200-year-old oil paintings. Geology dwarfs any life - however rich - that flows before it. And the chorus of wind keeps on singing.

Winds Gate finds John Thayer at this very riverside, pointing a field recorder and a modular rig right at the churn of the water, as if the Hudson River School painters traded their oils for Ableton. Sweet, weathered educational-film synth tones and drones fade into light over burbling, textural capture of forest transmissions, creaturely chatter, and riparian current while enigmatic audio processing pushes cycling white noise and chopped up samples from one speaker to the next and back again - a picture-perfect sonic representation of the river-as-crossroads. Impossibly huge sky above, an impenetrably deep canyon plunging below the surface, and near the margins a single human figure, reckoning with a terrible, liberating truth: we control not the tides, it’s all slipping away, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

But the work goes far deeper than mere evocation of place. For one thing, Thayer’s utter new age mastery of the studio makes this music sound quite unlike anything else, although comparisons to the chill-out room sophistication of 90s Warp releases and the heart-forward Kranky catalog would be appropriate. He’s fully embraced the near-infinite possibilities of constellated digital audio plugins, weaving dense, somewhat inscrutable webs of compressors, emulators, and modulation software while still applying old-school studio know-how and vintage hardware to the music. The sound is both refined and ethereal, both stippled and outlined, misty as the interior of a cloud. Spiritual tension, a devotee and a punk - he’s just as likely to throw out an anecdote from the DC hardcore scene as he is to quote the Tao Te Ching or Lee “Scratch” Perry.

You can hear his characteristic impressionistic mixing desk clarity on two notable projects from last year: the “laptop-jazz” fourth world groovers of YAI, his duo with Dave Lackner, and “Soft Power,” a phenomenally gentle Ezra Feinberg record co-produced by Thayer. Here, by the riverside, he allows for a bit more expansion, seeking music of the hidden currents. On the serene “Beginner’s Mind,” field-recording-as-audible-sunlight dapples in under hiccuping, left-hanging synth melodies, approaching satori. As introspection deepens, so too does the low end, and on “Twice Tides” long, sustained sine pads fade in like a distant thunderstorm breaking over the Berkshires. The album’s closer “Submarine Canyon” - named for the impossibly deep underwater canyon that begins as the river hits the ocean - goes fully submerged in flowing chords, taking the listener far below the surface, far into the infinite depths. Humanized by his own percussion takes and some bolstering upright bass played by Nick Joz (who, among others, has also worked with Ravi Coltrane), Winds Gate is that rare accomplishment: a clearheaded technical marvel that resonates emotionally and spiritually, skillfully grappling with both the lived experience of watching a river flow by and the peculiar, lonely feeling that the grandeur of the world can give you.

It’s a running joke among a certain type of NYC art striver that the river serves as a map of your life - the older you get, the further north you move along it, you start taking that train down into the city less and less. You cross a threshold: one day you drive the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson for the last time ever and you won’t even know it. By the time we turn to dust we’ll have made it back to Tear of the Clouds, cycling back to the headwaters. The river moves both ways, traveling toward origin and outward to the sea, it goes deeper than we’ll ever know and as we crawl along its banks we fold in on ourselves, an eddy in the current, reflecting off the surface of the river, a life just a glint of light.
-Ben Seretan

John Thayer: Modular Synth, Moog Matriarch, Percussion, Electronics, Field Recordings

Nick Joz: Upright bass (Tracks 1 & 2)

Cover Photo & Design: Lea Thomas

Composed, Recorded, & Mixed in the Hudson Valley, NY by John Thayer 2022-2025

“Music inspired by the unseen currents that shape our lives”

https://johnthayermusic.bandcamp.com

Deep listening for the new, now age

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