SUMAC’s new record, Love In Shadow—out Sept. 21 via Thrill Jockey—is an immersive and personal experience born in large part from vocalist, guitarist, and lead songwriter Aaron Turner’s life. Moments of clarity, intensity, and experimentation aiming to bridge that gap are all packed into four tracks on Turner’s latest excursion with the Pacific Northwestern band.
The record is a story that relays its message not by explanation but, instead, through a showcase. That story begins decades ago when Turner first found music he could hang onto as his own—namely, metal. His interests expanded to include punk music and, eventually, experimental sonic creations as well, and that broadened horizon forms the foundation of SUMAC and Love In Shadow. He explains, “That sort of adventurous music that existed well outside the realm of conventional pop music—even more so than the metal and punk stuff that I liked—really shaped my ideas further and maybe even finally in terms of what I wanted to do and what path I wanted to pursue.”
Turner’s work is hardly that of a one-trick pony. On a practical level, he’s been involved with a long list of projects throughout his musical career, and he reshapes notions about song structure, tempo, and the like in that broader environment. “I’m hoping that in some way, SUMAC is able to synthesize all those things into one cohesive whole,” he continues. “It’s really a summation of the musical journey that I’ve gone through in my life and a desire to take that foundation and shape it with what I consider to be my own voice and my own ideas.”
Turner’s own life experiences put meat on the bones of the skeleton provided by the music he has been exposed to and inspired by over the years. He explains that Love In Shadow is meant to explore the drive for love that he believes to be the basis of human existence. He sees evidence for that belief both in his personal circles and in society and the world at large. Placing himself, as an artist, alongside hosts of music listeners who dive into creations to explore being alive, he shares, “Music has been a journey for me to figure out what my own life and existence mean and how I relate to other people and how I can contribute to the world.”
Concurrent to Love In Shadow’s creation, Turner’s life took a new turn when he and his wife welcomed their first child into the world. At the same time, the lens through which he’d viewed the sociopolitical landscape remained in place while his line of sight came further into focus. “I realize that though it’s been hard for me to really concisely articulate what my beliefs are and what my conviction is about humanity,” he says, “when I’ve thought about it a lot—and in having conversations with other people about it quite frequently—what I came to is that I do believe that our capacity to love and our desire to be loved is at the basis of our existence. After fathering a child and seeing how he came into the world and watching his innate reactions to things, that belief was further solidified.”
“I’ve talked pretty extensively with the people that I’m close to about our observations about the world and how we fit into that and how so much of what seems to be going on right now is people fearfully reacting to one another in very aggressive ways,” he continues. “At the root of that seems to be that people are fearful about what’s going to happen to the world, what’s going to happen to them, what’s going to happen to their family, and what’s going to happen to their way of life. Across these fairly significant divides that people seem to be having great conflict over, the root thing is the same, and that is that people want to have their lives and they want to be happy and they want to be loved and they want their loved ones to be safe. That, to me, seemed like really fertile ground to explore right now. If I could find within me, and also within humanity at large, some kind of unifying factor, that felt like a meaningful thing for me to write about and, hopefully, a meaningful thing for people to experience as we present it in this context.”
The context Love In Shadow provides rests on a foundation of experimentation and even, at times, improvisation. While far from a carbon copy of any artist, Turner found Jimi Hendrix’s incorporation of feedback and distortion into his live sound inspirational, which symbolizes his take on music’s personality. “The artists that I’ve been really drawn to are the people who sound like they can’t help but sound like themselves,” he says. “It’s almost like they don’t know another way of playing than how they’re playing. That, to me, is extremely interesting.”
Turner flourishes in exactly that fashion in SUMAC, playing alongside bassist Brian Cook of Russian Circles and drummer Nick Yacyshyn of Baptists. Love In Shadow ties together his experiences in and out of music, providing a loop of inspiration and exploration. Experimentally heavy music dynamically portrays where he’s at in his life. Turner believes standard liberated music to be “a more direct reflection of the experience of being alive.”
“I want the songs themselves to be alive in the sense that they change over time and they’re very much about the moment in which they’re happening,” he adds. “Life itself is unpredictable, and it is not easily controlled, and our individual existence is very much impacted by those around us. So, in that way, I feel like the music represents that and is that. When we get into these parts of our songs where we’re abandoning a preconceived structure, we really just have to play off of and with each other and let it happen rather than trying to control it.”
Pushing life to the limit through art lets us discover new aspects of our collective trajectory here on this wild planet. SUMAC’s new record, Love In Shadow, exposes these developments—be they inside or outside of us.
“Art is a very important thing in our existence,” Turner comments. “In America and other parts of the world, the arts are considered a luxury, and maybe even self-indulgent. Yet, if you look back on our history as humans, much of what we’ve learned has been through the art and writing and sculpture and music that’s been left behind by previous societies and civilizations and peoples. I feel like art and music is not to be undervalued, because it says a lot about who we are, and it also has incredible potential in terms of its ability to connect people.”
Listeners can connect with SUMAC via a touring schedule that Turner hopes will take the band to the West Coast and Europe come 2019, following dates on the East Coast in late 2018.
