Mirah and Spectratone International

Share This Place is the album from K Records standout Mirah, but it also a multimedia project commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the Seattle International Children's Festival, comprised of the songs contained herein and accompanying stop-motion video by Britta Johnson. Inspired in part by the writings of French entomologist Jean Henri Fabré and the Capek brothers' anthropomorphic drama The Insect Play, with a dash of the insectile existentialism of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", Share This Place is a palimpsest where the separate fiefdoms of humans and insects are reconciled in one teeming kingdom. The album is more like To All We Stretch the Open Arm, the collection of traditional folk Mirah recorded with Seattle's Black Cat Orchestra, than her beloved C'mon Miracle. Forgoing that album's sketches, snippets, and snapshots, which were of a piece with the naively ramshackle twee for which her label is renowned, Share This Place employs a decidedly more adult, historically rooted method of songwriting and performing. These full-bodied songs, sturdily played by Spectratone International, draw from a variety of Asian and European folk idioms for their torch-lit, supple swoon. Kyle Hanson's drunkenly reeling accordion and Lori Goldston's weepy cello betray a strong Klezmer influence, while Kane Mathis's flickering oud (similar to a lute) injects Middle Eastern strains. Sympathetic production by Phil Elvrum and Steve Fisk amplifies Mirah's idiosyncrasies-- her non-sexual sensuality, her scenery-chewing vocal projection. Share This Place takes these concepts as givens: Since moving indoors, humankind has forgotten its symbiotic relationship with nature, viewing it instead as something essentially other. We designate some flora as desirable, other flora as weeds, and wreak destruction accordingly. Shirking the hard work and sacrifice of genuine preservation, we build natural preserves where we can absorb the bounty of wilderness, then rocket back to the industrial lifestyle that is inexorably devouring it. We regard the enclosures in which we live as interstices in the natural continuum, and woe be to any insect-- those stinging, buzzing pests-- that trespass our domain. Mirah understands that in a world where we'd rather let corporations build windmill farms in exchange for permission to pollute than to vote, with our dollars, against them polluting so damn much, humankind's sense of empathy is more direly in need of rejuvenation than EPA policy, and she begins the work on a resounding note with album opener and stand-out "Community". Singing with an arch lilt over a cursive scrawl of acoustic guitar, Mirah seems to choose an unambiguous side in the phylogenic war: "You have but two, we have six/ We can use them to such great accomplishment." She goes on to sing praises to the collaborative societies of insects, and humanity takes its fair share of knocks. But her mechanistic view of insect life-- "we communicate with chemicals"-- is tempered by an acknowledgement that the exchange of pheromones is infinitely mysterious, despite science's handy explanations: "It's an expressive art, instinctually smart/ Secretions quiet and dependable." In an era when we've chosen to understand our feelings as nothing more than the emulsion of certain chemical balances in our brains, couldn't she just as easily be singing about human existence? The song isn't, as it might seem on the surface, anti-human; it's pro-community, looking to egoless activity of the insect kingdom for inspiration. This is the album's most explicit salvo-- for the remainder, insects flit, often so symbolically as to be imperceptible, through Mirah's kaleidoscopic imagery. Because she often sings in the first person when she sings directly about critters, as on the languorous "Emergence of the Primary Larva", it's easy to forget that they're involved at all, reading the album instead as a metaphorical series of captivities, infatuations, and transformations. Like Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, she's fond of period-pieces, bombastic polysyllables, antique grammar, and mythological melodrama: "Song of Psyche" narrates the tale of Cupid's beloved, and it's worth noting that Mirah sounds much more anthropological here than when she's singing about bugs. A penchant for words like "numinous" and "proboscis" is liable to produce awkward syntax, but Mirah skirts this danger by treating each syllable like a discrete unit, parceling them out fluidly across the music's oompah fanfare. And like Joanna Newsom, whose fans should find plenty to admire here, she tends to let her narratives shuck off their literal focus and shimmer out into symbolically dense metaphysics. But unlike Newsom's Ys, which traversed majestic peaks and shadowy vales of ambiance, Share This Place is tonally flatter-- after awhile, the listener might feel bludgeoned by the pageantry, as more retiring songs that let us catch our breath, like the aforementioned "Community" or the vanishing ballad "Luminescence", are few and far between. Nevertheless, it's a rewarding album provided you've a high threshold for pomp. Recurring motifs circle and dart through dense thickets of imagery and verbiage. Magnificent solar events are as common as chrysalises and larvae, as are feasts and surfeit ("I will grow to eat my share/ of pastry rich beyond compare" she sings on the wheezy "Gestation of the Sacred Beetle"). While citing Wikipedia is always a sketchy business, one contextless tidbit it offers-- that Mirah was born on a kitchen table-- is too tantalizing to ignore. Whether the factoid is true or apocryphal, it strikes a resonant note, imbuing the singer's life with the same tall-tale proportions that animate her songs. In the end, the story of the insects is Mirah's own: "In 1975," she sings amid the smoky swirls of "Following the Sun", citing the year of her birth, "discovery arrived." And her story, in turn, abstracted through the lens of mechanistic behavior, is all of ours. Share This Place emanates from a microcosmic level, but fans out to encompass all of being, shredding through mental compartments like a termite and restoring, for its 48 minute duration, the continuum of life. Listening closely to this record, with its prodigious intelligence and sugar-coated polemics, might make stepping on an ant feel uncomfortably like stepping on yourself. Read more on Last.fm. 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