Rivulets
Debridement

Like finding yourself in a desert.

Dunes of sandy and elusive folk music, a desert of uncertainty and unease without oases or mirages, baked by the scorching sun of paranoia. With not even reason anymore to serve as a compass. Like finding yourself in the tundra. Cold and sharp light, notes that slowly take root in the heart like lichens, and then cling inside you without ever letting go.
Nathan Amundson is behind the moniker Rivulets. A grand and icy spirit like the Alaska that served as the backdrop to his childhood. A restless and vacillating soul in the quicksands of alcohol and fear. Like this album. At first listen, you might not like it. But then it slowly invades you in a subtle and intriguing way, it slithers inside you like a bad feeling in your stomach to which you can give neither a name nor a reason. It's as if you hear something wrong in this music. Then at some point, you grasp the butterflies of mystery and futility that hover over these musical flowers, and then you understand the struggle, the musical and human effort behind these eleven folk tracks, composed and crumbled in a trembling and muffled voice. And then you accept it and make it yours, this music, even if you continue to feel something infected within it, though incredibly alive.

It is certainly no coincidence that this album is titled so, surgically, "Debridement." It is a surgeon's "unraveling," like freeing a wound from something infecting it deeply, like purging an abscess of suffering from the soul. An abscess that presses and infiltrates daily life. Creating voids to then build something inside. The voids. How many there are, in this album. The sounds, first and foremost. The void and echoes of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Duluth, Minnesota, are perhaps the "instruments" that resonate the most in these tracks. And that gnawing feeling of unease that grips you from the very brief opener "An Evil." Forty-two seconds of a cappella singing, where there's only the childlike voice of Nathan warning obsessively in the void of the church that "There's an evil in this room." There's a bad in this room, there's a bad in this room... And it sounds unsettling like a threat, like a pointed finger, a "forewarned man..." But this room is a church, and Nathan already seems wrapped in a trembling aura of challenge, of an opponent, a shiver-inducing contrast created like this, in just forty-two seconds. An atmosphere so quietly tense, a spasm that freezes you in a sardonic grin in the following "Cutter." Opened by an acoustic plucking of guitars, reinforced by the banjo, Nathan's voice is a feather that cradles itself on the sea of nothing. To drift away in the silence of a soul that seems to have nothing more to say, in the void that sucks in.
The touching "Conversation With a Half-Empty Bottle" is dizzying, where the theme of dependency and pessimism reappears. The bottle to drain like time that does not pass. And that is always half-empty. There's only a guitar that strikes in minor here. And that struggle with vice and that thirst for self-destruction that had already taken shape in the previous "Alcohol EPs." An unhealthy thirst that floats on the echoes of the guitar in the cathedral, which only the ethereal and threadlike voice of Jessica Bailiff can sweeten with all her salvific load of femininity in "Shakes." If "Steamed Glass" is sweet and minimal, it is counterbalanced by a musical nightmare like "If It Is," with its percussion, its whistles, its creaky pews in the church. But it is in the suffocated, almost organ-like sounds of "The Sunsets Can be Beautiful (Even in Chicago)" that thought is lost, up to the minimal nihilism of the other tracks.
And you are in the tundra of the soul and in the temple of the unease of modern man.