Patricia Wolf - I'll Look For You In Others [Past Inside the Present]

[Scaramouche]

Excellent debt album from Patrica Wolf. 2022 has been very much about ambient and drone for me, and this has been a perfect accompaniment with the two sublime 12k albums this year, and Kali Malone's Cast of Mind reissue.

Beautiful album. 

Quote

I’ll Look for You in Others is the bittersweet fruit of a painful time in the Portland, Oregon, electronic musician’s life. Patricia wrote and recorded the album in 2020, in the aftermath of losing her mother-in-law to cancer and then, months later, losing a close friend. Created using her habitual materials—synthesizer and voice—in unfamiliar ways, the album served as a means of processing her feelings of heartbreak.

Feeling disconnected from everything around her, including her usual approach to music, Patricia found new inspiration in spectral processors—digital FFT algorithms that pull apart and reconfigure audio. As she reshaped her synthesizers and voice into stark, silvery new forms, she realized that the process functioned as a metaphor for grief itself: a representation of the transformation that happens when our loved ones are no longer with us as a physical presence, but are still alive within us in a beautiful new way.

I’ll Look for You in Others is not just a document of loss; it is a testament to the way the loss of loved ones changes our lives, and the way the presence of those we’ve lost changes shape after they are gone. I’ll Look for You in Others marks Wolf’s official debut album, following a long, extensive practice of live performance, sound-design projects, contributions to benefit compilations, and reworks of the music of her friends and peers.