Music Arcades: Charlotte Greig: Quite Silent

I've been listening to this album a lot over the past few days. It's so understated that it seemed to need several hearings. The album came out in 2005, and, aside from a couple of contributions to tribute albums, she's released nothing since then. As far as I know, her already rare live performances have more or less stopped. She played The Green Man Festival in 2006 and 2007, but not since. I'm not sure if Charlotte's appearance at this year's Laugharne Weekend (which I believe she co-curates with John Williams) was a musical one.

So is Quite Silent her last album? It has a feeling of retreat, like a mammal bedding down in leaves to hibernate (or something more permanent?). I went back to her first album, with which Quite Silent shares the song Bury Me (in a re-recorded version), and Charlotte's voice there is somehow clearer, more up front in the mix, and the playing more sharply enunciated. Even the photo of Charlotte on the cover of the earlier album is more confident, while that on Quite Silent is smaller, partially occluded and treated.

Quite Silent is the very embodiment of what I quoted from Guy about "the ingrained British habits of self-deprecation", and the opposite of the stark boldness of American post-war experimentation in the arts. Note: Quite Silent. And the album's homage to John Cage's 4'33" 'silent' piece is (can I say?) muted… in that it's not very silent at all: a 4'33" recording of the relatively riotous birdsong at 4:33 in the morning in a Welsh garden.

My hints of death are purely metaphorical. Charlotte seems to be active and busy writing radio plays (you hear Charlotte's I Sing of a Maiden, which features her singing several songs, including some from this album) and novels. I haven't read A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, but I gave K a copy because she enjoyed Down in the Valley so much.

I was thinking some more about the eternal-return/flourishing-contains-the-seeds -of-destruction theme I went on about last week. Another way of expressing it is to say that our destiny is to become compost for organisms and ideas that we can neither conceive or comprehend. Quite Silent sounds like the beginning of the composting has begun, the slow decay of the music creating the food that the plays and novels grow out of.

At the same time, Quite Silent also fed on the mutated forms of what went before, as outlined in Charlotte's notes on the songs and list of influences: Lal Waterson, Nico, Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, The Chantels, Love Unlimited, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Curtis Mayfield.