Possibly one of the most unexpected but beautifully executed collaborations of the year is the new release by Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo, In the Earth Again.
True to the title, much of the sound is inspired by the landscape both artists grew up in and continue to inhabit. Each hails from the southwestern United States, raised in contiguous corners of Texas and Oklahoma, with Hayden Pedigo being from Amarillo and Chat Pile from Oklahoma City. The result of their collaboration is in turn something that has the distinct sound of a vast expanse, both beautiful and haunting. Occasionally busy and raging with storms, then abruptly quieting into a pensive and tender emptiness. Both elements feel necessary, each bringing the listener to a kind of equilibrium, much like the natural balance of an ecosystem.
In live performances, Pedigo has humbly cautioned the crowd against overeager applause, as many of his songs are pregnant with long pauses, which represent the flat plane of his native landscape. Where Pedigo’s intricate, resonant fingerpicking conjures images of a vast skyline and a windy, dotted expanse, Chat Pile’s sound embodies the upheaval of the heavy earth; the downpour of a rioting summer storm, the excavation of what is buried deep below, where the soil finally becomes damp and alive.
Despite this disparity, Pedigo’s textural, pastoral Western guitar sound integrates surprisingly well with the heavy, raging intensity of Chat Pile’s sludge metal and noise rock. You can hear a great admiration for one another as artists in this collaboration. “We didn’t want this record to either end up primarily sounding like one of us more than the other,” Stin from Chat Pile states. “For the album, every decision made was in support of each other’s ideas and making sure that everything we did was in service of a greater vision.”
In The Earth Again holds the extremes of their sounds simultaneously. It allows Pedigo to channel his craft into something more sinister and evocative, while Chat Pile indulge in sample and tape manipulation, exploring a tenderness and depth of sincerity surpassing that of previous albums.
The opening track is “Demon Time”, which Pedigo says feels like the gateway to the rest of the album: “The calm before the storm… it’s eerie calm and you know something might be coming around the corner.” It feels like the unsettling heat before a downpour, or the foreboding green sky before a tornado. Much like the weather of the Southern Great Plains, the album is dramatic, shifting, and oscillates between extremes.
“Behold a Pale Horse” opens up with a delicate expanse, sprawling and vast with swelling guitars that culminate in a heavy catharsis. The release does not last long before giving way to a gentle pensivity, which soon rises again into dense, layered intensity. Pedigo offers a landscape barren, yet evocative, and Chat Pile drench it with rain, until it becomes restless and alive. It doesn’t feel rushed toward any conclusion, but instead wanders, losing itself in the storm. Who is to say if the resolution lives within the storm or in the emptiness that frames it.
The transition from the contemplative track “The Magic of the World” into “Fission/Fusion” is heady and intoxicating. With textures and motifs ubiquitous to Chat Pile’s discography,”Fission/Fusion” dives into immediate aggression; hostile, uncompromising, and wild. Eventually, it dissolves itself into exhaustion, closing with a sample of a woman yelling on the street as the wind is aggressing the mic.
The opening of the next track, “The Matador” could serve as a perfect backdrop for a post-apocalyptic horror film. Cyclical, rhythmic, mechanical, and eerie, it transitions (guided by another sample that sounds like a woman leading someone through a meditation or a panic attack) into something lulling and hypnotic, before collapsing into a quintessentially gritty, Chat Pile-esque breakdown. The track evokes numbness and tranquility, a sense of being immobile and sedated while chaos and madness whirl around you. The sampled voice fades in and out, overridden by dark ambient textures and waves of desperate intensity from the pounding riffs and screaming vocals.
In The Earth Again does exactly what music should do: challenge genres and barriers by inventing new sounds through a shared common ground. Through his own work, Pedigo was already challenging the possibilities of storytelling without words, and what he conveys with guitar alone is remarkable once again in this new environment. In The Earth Again takes you to a crossroads on an endless plane that you cannot backtrack from, and have no idea how you got to, but it is a beautiful place. Alternating between shouting into the void and listening to it, the tracks on the album invite reflection and unexpected emotion when you surrender to its current. Seemingly defined by contradictions, with titles like “Inside” and “Outside” for the opening and penultimate tracks, there’s an appreciable relationship between the contrasting duality of Chat Pile’s sound and Pedigo’s.
The track “Behold a Pale Horse” in particular embodies the dynamic interplay and cohesion between these two visions. Either artist’s sound can represent both the internal or external, and at times they seem to exchange places, becoming both alternatively. Inside and outside, as above so below, as within so without. While not all the places we are taken to are beautiful, there is a shining thing concentrated in the center of the ugly and abandoned places. As is the nature of upheaval and excavation.
