Michael Scott Dawson - Nowhere, Middle of

October 16, 2020 - We Are Busy Bodies

Artists spend a lot of energy trying to evoke a sense of place, a presence of “other space” that is larger than the art object itself and envelops the audience. I’ve only recently become awakened to the sense of painterly space on a canvas or board that allows two-dimensional worlds to call out to me in museum corridors. Obviously, a museum’s architecture is crafted to heighten visitors’ experience of its collection, with meticulous walls and meticulous lighting. But the artworks themselves are specifically designed to command space both within and around them. 

It’s not something we generally think about as onlookers. In fact, it’s not something I think artists want us to think about much at all, in the same way graphic designers want us to read a layout’s text in a certain hierarchical order without conscious awareness that we read it that way. When acceptable in the world that surrounds us visual creatures, we walk to what we’re attracted to, and we take a selfie next to it so we can prove that we looked. Aware of it or not, just like the pretty things we walk toward, we are objects in space. 

I would argue Saskatchewan-based musician Michael Scott Dawson is more aware of his objectivity than most. His debut solo album Nowhere, Middle of is a collection of ambient electronic soundscapes that he carved out meticulously after a period of suffering from vertigo, a condition that affects your spatial perception, causing a sensation of moving or of surrounding objects moving when they aren’t. The vertigo separated him from the ability to make, and even listen to, music. It’s a story that fills me with terror—a bodily experience that inhibits an artist’s ability to create in their medium. And Dawson is no newcomer. He’s been in the music scene for over a decade, collaborating and playing with various bands, most notably as the lead singer and lyricist for the indie rock band Library Voices. The loss of sensory access to music, though temporary, must have been devastating. 

Nowhere, Middle of offers listeners an extraordinary perspective of a musician relearning how to interact with music. The album’s title indicates an awkward positioning, in both the concept of “the middle of nowhere” as well as the reversed syntax of the common phrase about being lost. Listening to the album from start to finish, there is a linear progression from track to track, each one building upon the textures of the last as Dawson’s new perspective blooms into focus like a garden he’s painstakingly cultivated one seed at a time. Or like the act of becoming found when lost. Using a new obsession with detail that departs from his indie punk roots, Dawson luxuriates in subtlety and writes songs without lyrics, pounding percussion or recognizable compositional structure. 

He brings your focus instead to the dissonance that forms when sounds are layered on top of each other. He heightens and diminishes the wavering you can hear when sound waves just don’t quite line up perfectly. Pillowy melodic treble synths ring in circles like crystal wine glasses or Tibetan singing bowls, distorting your sense of space around you, making you seasick at times. Strings hum underneath you, and occasionally you can hear dreamy echoes of guitar riffs and musical equipment glitches. Field recorded sounds are meticulously curated and timed, ensuring you notice every moment despite the meditative quality of this ambient genre. Dawson paints with a limited color palette, which brings cohesion to the album as a whole, but there is still enough of a difference from one track to the next for the mind to stay engaged. With poetic titles like ‘Superheaven,’ ‘Red Tape Factory,’ ‘All The Things This Isn’t’ and ‘The Fox Sisters,’ these are interesting landscapes to explore, each unique and presented through Dawson’s newfound point of view. 

It’s no easy feat to craft engaging minimalist abstraction. For Michael Scott Dawson, Nowhere, Middle of is a triumphant return to the craft of music making, indeed. He walked through the North American wilderness and brought back something new. ☔