Monarch Season

Jennifer Castle’s sixth full-length record, the moon-suffused Monarch Season an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake butterfly stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper “solo” album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout.)

Monarch Season is an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake creature. Although created half a year pre-pandemic, Castle deliberately pursued a minimalist, homebound, and solitary process that represented, for her musical practice, a radical reduction of scale, coupled with a telescopic expansion of scope.

The follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record Angels of Death, Monarch Season is Castle’s private experiment on the effects of microgravity in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night Monarch Season transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental Theory Rest, to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water.

She recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and for the first time on record harmonica. Jennifer dedicates her blowing to friend and mentor Kath Bloom, who played the Pink City harp. Her airy, lambent voice renders these taut poems as elegant inscriptions within circumscription, fully present and presciently articulate, months before the age of coronavirus quarantines, about the troubles and delights to be found in aloneness, in the patient observation of our immediate surroundings, and if you’re lucky in negotiating abiding love.