Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a musician based in New York. They work with synthesis, electronics, and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in studio compositions and live performances. Previous releases include full length albums for She Rocks! and Reading Group.
Their most recent work and first vinyl release, Sending Up A Spiral Of (Recital 2023) well encapsulates Spann’s body of work thus far. On their music, which reacts to themes of family systems and care work, Sydney writes, “people who have done care work —nannies, sex workers, therapists, nurses— may possess their own musical knowledge, developed over time through particular modes of voicing practiced to achieve a desired outcome in their labor. Attending intimately to these ways of voicing and listening and bringing them into a sound practice could be a way to legitimize a less recognized kind of musical knowledge.”
Sending Up A Spiral Of explores this unarticulated expression through sound and song. The titular piece traces Spann within some quixotic woodland, as if beginning inside of some urban fairy-story. Self-soothing singing quivers under dragging branches, peeling cement and other tactile grit. The work drops into a new proximity half-way through as electronic contours overtake the environment. Sine-tones smolder in a pulsating choreography, perhaps reminiscent of Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music” played at half-speed.
The second section of the record depicts a series of five smaller portraits, expressed (or disguised) as lullabies. An oceanic humming permeates them. “Possession” and “Purposeful Evening” are the most song-like lullabies, with their verse-chorus repetition and melodic simplicity. Innocuous words “baby” and “honey” are encoded with deeper, often painful connotations. Sydney’s voice and vision for this album is ambitious, cloaked in the strains and contradictions of what love means in the nuclear family.
Spann has performed at venues like Floristree, the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, Public Records, Cafe OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), Les Ateliers Claus (Brussels), and Default (The Hague). They were a 2022 Artist in Residence at ISSUE Project Room (NY) and collaborate with Kiera Mulhern, Theodore Cale Schafer, and Michelle Luong.