In pursuit of expressing and preserving nature
Amy Godsey is a musician and apparel designer currently based in Los Angeles. Her latest album Ananta was written in the wake of loss: her best friend died, COVID exploded, and she left New York with just a suitcase and “no plans except to head west.” Despite the tumult of a time like that, Ananta isn’t sad or even what I’d call an exploration of grief exactly, but it does seem to reflect what Godsey was experiencing in its emotional ambivalence. It has an aimless quality about it, as if it was made as a cautious exercise in exploring newly available freedom. Songs and titles like “No Plans” address this notion most squarely, but a song like “Should I Meet You” expresses this peregrination best through a gently bubbling tomtom pattern that you can never quite catch hold of, sitting safely under a constantly undulating harp that keeps intersecting itself and occasionally collapses under the weight of its delay. Godsey is following her nose, letting the process dictate the result.
Ananta has its more straightforward moments too, no doubt; songs like “Mental Vibrations” and “Heartless in the Sea” rest on grounded drum machine patterns and riffs that feel familiar. But Godsey seems most lucid when she lets down these guardrails and allows the mess to spill out more. The album is strongest at its most meandering.
That’s not to say this is messy music; to the contrary, it’s meticulous music that–despite its reliance on electronic instruments–seems intended to address nature, both floral and faunal (and human). Nature is chaotic too, for all its perfection and beauty. This dichotomy is reflected on a song like “Windy”, which vacillates between breezy cascades of sine waves and the near-disconcerting babble of what sounds sort of like a digital didgeridoo. This subject matter is no coincidence. When Godsey left New York, she didn’t land in LA right away. The album was written while she was nomadic, living alone surrounded by wilderness. Ananta bottles some of the inspiration and serenity of that kind of setting, but also some of its danger. It’s freeing to breathe in cold forest air, but there are beasts out there too.
Amy Godsey – “Windy” (bc)
Amy Godsey – “Heartless in the Sea” (bc)