Loadbang: A Garden Adorned
In March of 2025, Loadbang will release their newest record (featuring yours truly). What follows is an essay of mine, written for the liner notes.
A Garden Adorned
“This garden was the final consummation of the thought of the garden itself, this garden could be characterized, putting it most precisely, by how its creator had ‘attained simplicity,’ this was a garden […] that expressed the infinitely simple via infinitely complex forces.” (László Krasznahorkai)
It is by neither content nor arrangement nor even by its color that a garden may be said to be so named; gardens are not what they contain. Vulgar Latin records the telling phrase hortus gardinus, “enclosed garden,” wherein it is surprisingly the hortus (der. horticulture, cohort) that signifies the garden; gardinus, with its roots in the Proto-Indo-European gher, means only the enclosed. Which is to say that, by etymology alone, the Anglophone “garden” signals nothing beyond a decision. “Garden” is hacceity, any designation of this here as roped off and distinct from all that there. A garden is an intention, a cordoning, an encasement, an intervention in the natural order into which one whispers: “I will place my care here.” A garden is not yet a form, only the gentle aspiration to take one.
The will to act so into nature on presumed authority admits two contrary positions: that one stands outside the world by the desire to wield it, and yet that one is forever indentured to its wider forces of season and planetary passage in that pursuit. It is this irreparable duality that has for so long endowed the garden as a privileged site for thinking humanity’s unbearable awareness of its limits, its enclosure. From Eden on, gardens have stood symbolic of our unhappy knowledge of skin: nakedness and vulnerability to the world comes to us first in the garden. It is there that we become aware of our own edge, the physical limit beyond which we exercise no real command. Skin marks our threshold, our isolation from the planet. It also delimits the body as container, as a structure within which lies potential, an enclosure with the desire to take form. We recognize ourselves in the garden’s mirror; the painful revelation: “there is an outside.”
Taking as a thematic Oscar Bettison’s title image—“I am a garden adorned with stars and all celestial bodies”—, the five works collected on this album attend, each in their own way, to this, the garden’s existential polarity. Bettison’s work draws its texts from slipshod and extemporized translations of an Ibn Zamrak poem still carved into the walls of the Alhambra. To English from Arabic by way of Spanish interlocutors, the words are crumbling and opaque, forever twice removed from any concretizing origin; the music, with its endless circuits of slow variation, follows suit. Infinite refraction of a limited material is mirrored by Yotam Haber, whose “In a Rug of Water,” scored for triple quartet, takes superimposition and acoustic dislocation to their structural extreme. The refrain of an early eponymous poem by Thomas Bernhard—aptly pondering nature’s sanctuary from the violence of being—is funneled through a series of cavernous, adjoining rooms. Along the way, Bernhard stumbles upon another star-sewn garden: “In a rug of earth/I stitch my transience/I embroider my night/and my hunger/my sorrow.”
“Reckoning,” rehearsed in the Chihuahuan Desert, is inseparable from the arid swaths of barren vastness that underwrote its whelping. To know Raven Chacon’s music is to enter into charged exchange with Indigenous American landscapes and to participate in the politics of a non/belonging in and to it. As the title suggests, there is accounting still to be had in the body-earth-ownership dilemma; “Reckoning” undertakes a small piece of that attenuated negotiation. Meanwhile, where Bettison, Haber, and Chacon cast their gazes outward to the horizon, Christina George turns her sight inward. Each of her five “Liminal Songs” are a microcosm away from the world. The lacework of these precious spaces, knit furtively as self-refuge, invest in the small and the simple, only to find again the soul implicated in logics beyond its ken: “There is a pattern here and I am in it, though I cannot touch the sides or see the edges.”
It is only by arriving at Laura Cetilia’s “breath of cinder; depth of moss” that decay’s patient inevitably—common both to humanity and to plants—makes itself heard. A kind of inverse to Chacon’s desert, Cetilia’s humid proliferations of lichen and creeping hedera unfurl in damp and shady crevices. But the rich lushness of her tender harmonies is striated, undercut by distant whispers of some ashen, burnished hiss: the first spot of brown in the autumn leaf’s slow descent. When verdancy’s soft hum has all but faded into ruin, this brush of time continues, ongoing and eternal; it is these cycles of ebb and loss that join the body wholly to the garden at last.
If this album may be said to boast a through-line, it is in the dilation of being’s intimacy that gardens alone procure. In varying guises and scales across this album, that cosmic gulf between the self and the unknowable heavens reappears: on the walls of ancient palaces; in the wars of existential despair; in the dark of desert howling; in the slow expanse of bryophytes; and in the raindrop perched precarious on the stooped tip of a leaflet. The garden’s open promise—to hold a space for form—permits this rare commingling of universe and individual in one and the same motion: “the infinitely simple via infinitely complex forces,” as Krasznahorkai’s narrator put it. Which is why we return, again and again, to its impermanent enclosure: to feel once more the smallness of one so big in this world.
“He could have endeavored, examining the garden’s depths, to grasp what the existence of crystal systems, crystal classes, elemental cells, the seemingly infinite variability of crystal formations, namely what existence of the laws of symmetry meant—the laws of symmetry: the law according to which the source of immortality is none other than repetition itself.”