Impatient by The Early

In The Situation And The Story, Vivian Gornick describes the profundity of a eulogy whose effect is only discovered a day after hearing it, when she realizes she is still thinking about it. Wondering why, she concludes it was the very act of someone organizing their memory. "The eulogy, standing in the air before me like a composition. That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference." The eulogy is an uncanny production because the gravity of its occasion elicits two contradicting expectations. First, that the feelings should be spontaneous, and second, that the words ought to be totally rehearsed. I suspect Gornick is saying this is what it means to organize the evocation of a listener through a practice of art. This is how an artist measures the anticipation, the expectation and impatience of their pending interlocutor. And this is the composition’s ability to be both the thought and the thoughtfulness surrounding the phenomenon to which we gather and respond.

This kind of composed-improvised music is an organizing principle in the relationship of memories between Alex Lewis and Jake Nussbaum. The fact that they call themselves The Early, and that the conceptual framework of impatience is used to describe this suite of work, suggests a deliberation about time and timeliness. I prefer to understand their entanglement with time as rather about a readiness, a preparedness. The occasion to which they call themselves may be surprising. At least as surprising as the timbre of someone snapping their fingers, or the news. But they are ready. And that is what one can understand to be Early. Not that one has arrived before anything, but that they are simply already here, already there. The loop and the ostinato are the concentric circles in which a Sycamore tree will identify its age, its past, its future. So The Early is in fact exactly that, as much as it might be unprepared and not ready for the unpredictable, it is still here for when it is provoked to the occasion of a sound. Their destiny is in the lullaby not the slumber, in the entanglement, not the contact, in the memory not the death. From the primordial universe of Map Turtle, you can hear the duo finding corners inside of a heart beat, multiplying and dividing it over different eras.

Like Gornick’s eulogist, The Early are composing. Like the occasion, the music is an event. As with musicians who depend on their instruments’ designs to develop their sound, the listening becomes a part of the occasion, too.

– Anne Ishii, October 2023

Formed in north Jersey in 2004, The Early spans two decades, two coastlines, and an evolving lineup of multi-instrumentalists, metabolizing the textural grandeur of post-rock, the communicational intimacy of jazz improvisation, and the patient grooves of minimalism.

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