OLD FIRE ANNOUNCES VOIDS
Old Fire–the recording project of Abilene, TX-based composer and producer John Mark Lapham–has announced his sophomore album, Voids, will be released on November 4th, 2022, via Western Vinyl. The largely collaborative album features vocalists Bill Callahan, Adam Torres, Emily Cross, and Julia Holter, as well as a myriad of musicians. Out today alongside a video, the album’s stirring, somber lead single, “Don’t You Go ft. Bill Callahan,” is a cover of British singer-songwriter John Martyn that also features Thomas Bartlett on piano, Semay Wu on cello, and Robin Allender on keys/guitars. Voids is now available for pre-order.
“I originally created some ideas for this cover with a composer friend of mine and it laid around without a vocalist for years. The song really resonated with me so I took my ideas for it and asked Thomas Bartlett to be involved, who in turn recorded a beautiful piano part for it. Bill was the last piece of the puzzle. I set out to find a vocalist who was a little older, someone who could add to the southern gothic feel of the album. I was introduced to him by our mutual friend, Thor Harris, and it evolved from there,” Lapham explains. “Lyrically the themes of loss and mourning of this track fit well into the overall narrative of the album. With the video, I wanted to express those concepts, and portray them as the father being buried alive by his memories and his hurt. As with other elements of Old Fire, the setting had to be West Texas, as there is so much desolation and decay in this area.”
Composed of 12 genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, Voids was created over five difficult years. “I was feeling the brunt of a relationship ending, and the emptiness it left behind,” says Lapham. “Over the course of compiling the album, I lost both my parents, and the pandemic started. These recordings were born out of that loss, and that isolation. The title Voids was a natural fit.” Half the songs feature a guest vocalist, half are fully instrumental (Voids’ array of diverse musicians also includes pedal steel legend Bob Hoffnar, keyboardist Christian Madden, guitarist Alex Hutchins, ambient composer Wayne Robert Thomas, Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive, multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris, saxophonist Joseph Shabason, drummers Joe Ryan and Robb Kidd, and more), and many dovetail seamlessly into the next or are born out of parts, loops, samples, or textures of another—creating a captivating sonic collage.
In the age of remote collaboration, features can easily feel glued-on; the disparities in recording locales, artistic visions, and sensibilities sometimes compound inside each psychoacoustic detail to the point of disproportion. Voids makes clear, however, that one of Lapham’s many talents is selecting contributors whose timbres and temperaments soak effortlessly into every atom of his sonic sculptures. “I usually send a collaborator a piece of music with some general ideas of what I'm looking for, and let them develop it as they see fit. I give them some preliminary lyrics I've written, or at least some themes of what the song is about, then they write lyrics and ideas based around that,”he explains. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth before we get it right, and almost always there are unexpected turns in the process where it ends up being something very different from what we started with. I bring it all together, but the album exists because of their contributions.”
Lapham’s music and visual art—he doubles as a video editor and animator, and has made music videos for bands such as Goat, Throwing Muses, Night Beats, Moon Duo, Jane Weaver, and many others—are stitched with threads spun from the dissonance between his identity and the doggedly conservative cultural atmosphere in which he was raised, ventured away from by adulthood, and ultimately returned to in 2013. As evidenced by the alternating apprehension and expansion on Voids, Lapham wields his creativity as a covert weapon against his once and future surroundings as if the act of creating something, anything, is in itself defiant of the cultural, structural, and even climatic deterioration of many West Texas towns. Across the album, and through the concept of Old Fire as a project, he builds a mythical, noir-ish version of his home state and its wide open spaces, painting these fictional narratives with the music.
Across Voids, an awareness of tragedy and loneliness is made palatable by the album’s exciting and varied topography, which stands insubordinately against Lapham’s real-life surroundings. The settlers who established West Texas towns like the one he calls home must have done so with a sense of hope despite the hostility of their surroundings, however inevitable the withering. Similar spirits speak through Lapham’s work, and he welcomes them as fascinating old friends. “That more than anything inspired a lot of what I try to express through Old Fire—faded memories, former glories, places lost in time,” he discloses. “Whatever I was trying to express wasn't finished with the first album, like a story that was only half-read. It seemed like that was only the beginning, and there was a lot more ground to cover.” If there is ground still uncovered for Old Fire after Voids, it's sure to be lush in spite of—or perhaps because of—the dusty soil beneath it.
