In her 1977 essay collection On Photography Susan Sontag explained why photos of people are so sad. She called it ‘posthumous irony’; the implied knowledge that by the time a photograph is seen the body that it captured has already grown, moved forwards, left that space behind. It’s something inherent to the act of memory itself, the sadness that tinges the moment of nostalgia is one cognisant of the inevitability of time, the inability to go back and live it all again. On his new EP Amtracks Dylan Henner trades in that same posthumous irony, the same mourning over lost history. Since the release of his startling and gorgeous debut The Invention of the Human Henner has been busy, releasing collaborative singles and EPs. Amtracks is the latest within that. Based on a journey Henner took on the Amtrac train service across Pennsylvania many years ago, these tracks are singular in vision and gentle to the touch. They are attempts to capture a specific beat of Henner’s own history, whilst also sonic musings on the act of memory itself, the joyful sadness of having a history to remember and forget at all.
Usually Henner’s music begins with sound recorded in the world. As a photographer’s assistant Henner spent time traversing new places, and would often record the sounds he found along the way, those captured memories becoming the foundation for his music. But with the pandemic curtailing his ability to travel the world in pursuit of new present-tense sound, Henner was forced to go backwards, digging into his own past to find new inspiration. Amtracks draws on on found-sound, woozy synth lines and marimba notes to capture that feeling of past-digging. You feel, listening to the record, as if peering through mist, detecting the outlines of remembered objects for a moment, before allowing each to recede. The marimba notes on the opening track recall the bell of an on-train announcement, the rhythm of those spiralling notes on Harrisburg the rolling of train wheels. We feel as if inside Henner’s own memories as he attempts to piece them back together, grasping at the edges he recalls and filling in the parts he can’t.
And one of the great strengths here, that has always been a joy of Henner’s ambience, is the boldness of sound he crafts. Though the backdrop may be the broad, spacey sounds typical of the scene, Henner allows his instrumental palette to wander, highlighting moments with idiosyncratic baubles. The strange, restless burbling at the top of Elizabethtown, not unlike scrambled speech. The warped, conversing synth lines all through Ardmore. There’s something distinctly human about the sound that Henner curates. The different elements of his sonic landscape personified and sat in dialogue with one another, haunted by the ghosts of characters he met along the way.
And these tracks are starkly romantic, less in the modern sense of the word and more in their suggestion of deep, earnest feeling. The romance of a train journey. The romance of memory itself. Often relying on swelling chords rolling into one another, slow builds over the course of a track, it gives the thing an off-kilter cinematic quality, a soundtrack to a half-remembered dream. In the second half of Ardmore the thing swells for a moment and the sound of a train, a platform, bubbles to the top, briefly, before surrendering and sinking down. The tragedy that is memory and forgetfulness played out in the tectonics of the sound.
It’s significant that the journey Amtracks portrays is one through the US. Journeying in that land has an innately nostalgic quality, with so much of the romantic spirit of that country resting on a yearning for a forgotten, maybe non-existent past. Amtracks holds traces of that, with Henner’s journey synecdoche for our own travels through nostalgic feeling. It is a slight thing, this EP, but a powerful one, and one that holds a lot of weight without over-balancing its ideas. It maintains Henner as vital artist in the ambient scene, putting his work on the horizon to look out for in the future.
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