Freak Scene #87: Norma Dream Explore Contrasts on 'Mercy Drops'
Plus, Rafiq Bhatia gets thoughtfully experimental on his new album, 'Environments'
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, Northampton’s Norma Dream release a debut LP into what has been a tumultuous year for bandleader Norma Jean Haynes, and the composer and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia goes deep on his new album Environments.
Norma Dream’s new album Mercy Drops started taking shape when bandleader Norma Jean Haynes fell in love on Corsica.
The Northampton native was on the French island as part of a trip with Village Harmony, a program dedicated to studying and performing traditional choral music. She fell for a Swiss sculptor, with whom she communicated entirely in French. At the same time, Haynes was struck by the landscape: a bone-dry mountain surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of her trip, she left the sculptor behind, but came home with the beginnings of her second album, and her first as Norma Dream.
“This experience of falling in love in another language, and also falling in love with the language of French while I was falling in love with this person, and the really stark contrast between drought and water — that presence and absence, both of water and love, became the inspiration for Mercy Drops.”
The album features 10 rootsy folk songs that Haynes wrote on banjo, with lyrics that refer here and there to New England’s sacred harp singing tradition. After writing the songs, Haynes began playing with drummer and percussionist Will Amend, and by September 2024, their collaboration had expanded to include Eli Liguz on guitar, Camille Vogley-Howes on fiddle, Nino Soberon on cello and Madden Alea on keyboards. Haynes dubbed the ensemble Norma Dream, and they perform an album-release show Saturday at Bombyx in Florence (tickets).
“When I was playing solo, I learned a lot about storytelling and how to convey a song in a way that resonates with an audience, but it’s a totally different thing when you do it with a lot of other musicians,” says Haynes, who began playing banjo when she was 11, and writing songs as a teen. “It’s such a different experience, for you and for the audience.”
Though Haynes grew up immersed in folk and choral music, she has branched out stylistically, thanks in part, she says, to the jumble of musical styles she has encountered around the Valley.
“Living here and in this small yet diverse music scene and playing on a lot of mixed bills, I get to play with noise musicians and ambient musicians and pop musicians and punk musicians, and it's been really lovely and informative,” Haynes says. “I feel that my music's changed a lot, and I've become much more experimental.”
Mercy Drops comes in the latter half of what has been a trying year. Haynes’ father died in March (Christopher Haynes was a longtime accompanist on accordion with the Young@Heart Chorus, assistant professor emeritus of music at Springfield College and the producer of Norma Jean’s first album, 2021’s Mothers & Daughters). In June, Haynes was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer that affects white blood cells. Following treatment this past summer, she’s now in remission. Though Haynes certainly couldn’t have planned it, the songs on Mercy Drops seem prescient to her now.
“I do feel like sometimes you write a song for your future self,” Haynes says. “I had an experience with Mothers & Daughters that I had again with Mercy Drops where I would listen to the album months after it was finished, and wonder at the fact that it seemed written for what I was going through. The idea of mercy drops — an accumulation of tiny graces into a sea of essential love — rings true for me now in ways I could never have anticipated. I try to hold the water from the album cover up to my own lips with a prayer for healing.”
Rafiq Bhatia Lets His Garden Grow Wild on ‘Environments’
When Rafiq Bhatia called his new solo album Environments, the composer and guitarist intended to evoke the idea of a natural state in its most encompassing sense.
“It’s returning the body to nature’s timescale,” says Bhatia, who performs as part of a trio tonight, Friday, Oct. 10, at Hope Center for the Arts in Springfield (free tickets here; enter FREAKSCENE in the coupon-code field). “But it's not to be confused with music dealing with the subject of nature that only deals with the parts of nature that are consonant or calm. You know, it's pretty deep-tissue at times, gets very visceral, and is also dealing with nature as a metaphor for sublimation and transcendence.”
That’s a lot of thematic exposition for an album comprising eight improvised instrumental tracks, performed by Bhatia, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and drummer Ian Chang on acoustic and electric percussion. (Chang is Bhatia’s bandmate in Son Lux, an indie-experimental trio perhaps best known for their Oscar-nominated score for the 2022 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.) Yet Bhatia has thought deeply about what this music means, and the approach he and his collaborators took to making it. Inspired in part by working on the 2022 film On Blue by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bhatia describes a process that fell somewhere between shaping the sound, like one would an ice sculpture, and tending to a flourishing garden.
“I hear a real big difference between what I was doing, say, on my last album, which feels more like bonsai, where every piece of it is just so, and it’s very meticulous,” Bhatia says. “Whereas this music to me feels like if it were an object and I could push my finger into it, it would spring back. It has this very alive feeling, like a garden left to grow wild.”
Though the musicians created the songs in real time in the studio, often in one take, they were responding to prompts intended to help them evoke a certain feeling. On opening track “Aviary I | Sunrise,” for example, the trio worked within structural constraints.
“I wanted it to feel like the moments where you’re in the transition from being asleep to being awake, and then that would give way to this sort of forest floor environment where you experience that space, or our evocation of that space, for some amount of time,” Bhatia says.
Instrumental technique is essential for collaborating on improvised music, but there’s another skill that’s even more crucial.
“Listening is more important than anything else,” Bhatia says. “This music couldn't exist without very deep and careful listening, because in many cases, we’re creating shapes together. I often go back to an architecture analogy, but we’re creating these structures, these sort of sand shapes, evoking natural worlds and things like that. And you just wouldn’t know what to do or how to function inside of that if you weren’t listening while you’re playing in a way that practices full mindful presence.”
Ideally, that meditative sensibility spills over to listeners, too.
“It’s a mindfulness practice,” Bhatia says. “And I think that by playing music in that way, you also can communicate a reminder that that state of being exists to the people who experience it.”
Upcoming Concerts
The Iron Horse in Northampton hosts a Sunday matinee with Chris Smither & the Motivators Nov. 16 (tickets), latter-day NRBQ Jan. 2 (tickets) and 3 (tickets) and the Big Bad Bollocks St. Patrick's Day Celebration March 13 (tickets).
The Drake in Amherst has former Northampton musician Izzy Hagerup, a.k.a. Prewn, playing an album release show Nov. 29 (tickets) and offers a landforms theme Dec. 9 with Pink Mountaintops and White Hills, with Willie Lane & Ski Patrol, featuring J Mascis on drums (tickets). Psychedelic country-rockers Night Moves are there Jan. 29 (tickets).
Local vaudeville rockers Bella’s Bartok (see Freak Scene #51) play the Vagabond Ball at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield Oct. 17, with the Slambovian Circus of Dreams and the Picky Bastards (tickets).
Ty Segall releases albums so fast it’s a wonder he has time to write any songs; somehow he also made room for a tour, with a stop May 1 at District Music Hall in Norwalk (tickets). Ben Folds is there May 7 (tickets).
All righty, that’s it for this week, but maybe you’re wondering, why is this newsletter called Freak Scene? Find the answer here. Also, I’m always open to submissions. You can send music for coverage consideration to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first.
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