Rachel Eckroth & John Hadfield: Speaking In Tongues

John Hadfield wrote "Blood Moon" in shocked response to learning that, in 1504, during his fourth transatlantic voyage, Christopher Columbus had used his knowledge of an upcoming Blood Moon eclipse to manipulate reluctant indigenous Jamaicans into granting him food and supplies. The Jamaicans had been fooled before by Columbus' unfair trade practices and wanted no part of him, that is until he made them believe that it was his magic that had turned the moon a fiery red-orange and caused it to disappear for a time.

But we might hear the first 45 seconds of the piece as part of a sci-fi soundtrack or the prelude to a planetarium event. With an unexpected flourish, the scene changes. The amorphous outer-space electronics disappear, gulped into the form of a jazz tune. A funky electronic bass line articulates the additive metric cycle of the piece (groupings of 4, 5, then 6 beats), using a quasi-vocal sound somehow reminiscent of South Asian drum syllables. Electronics re-emerge during the head and improvisations, supporting Rachel Ekroth's acoustic piano and Hadfield's drums rather than acting as fully independent elements. They create airy drones, floating like plumes of smoke during the piano and drum solos. Elsewhere, they highlight specific rhythms, harmonies and dynamics created by the acoustic instruments.

"Rachel and I are both into making the acoustic sound electronic," Hadfield explained in an interview with the duo on Conversations with Musicians (Leah Roseman, 2025), and "incorporating the electronic with the acoustic so it's hard to tell where it starts and ends." With Speaking in Tongues, the genesis is clear. They laid down the acoustic tracks at Sierra Studios in Athens. The album continued to develop thereafter, as electronics—and Ekroth's atmospheric vocals—were added in the home studios of Hadfield—who divides his time between Paris and New York—and Ekroth, who lives in Phoenix when she is not on the road with St. Vincent or one of the many other projects she is involved with.

Ekroth and Hadfield met back in 1996, as music students at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Now both highly successful award-winning touring and recording artists, they reconnected at a recording session in Paris and decided to do something together. The "goal" of the endeavor was, as Hadfield put it, "to have a really transportable project that we enjoy doing," to have it be just "two of us, hopping on a train in Europe, not shlepping a ton of stuff, keeping it simple."

Transformations the two musicians made in their individual ateliers after their initial recording session together added complexity, Hadfield admits, requiring a few more items to shlep on the train, but the effect of the layering is remarkable, contributing Aurora Borealis-like bursts of light and streaks of color to the already-vibrant acoustic palette of grand piano and drum kit, making the music appear to reach into a vast universe of sound, causing the acoustic elements to sparkle and bathing rhythmic lines in an extra-terrestrial glow.

Comments