Stange Animals
A temporary fix can become the thing you most want to keep. While making Strange Animals, Ashley Ray Simon sang a trumpet part as a placeholder, then left it in the recording. It is the sort of detail that makes his account of the process engaging: a small decision that opens onto a larger question about where our ideas come from. Simon began the title track improvising with producer Moses van den Bogaerde, before recording a vocal with a book of Byron in hand. According to him, 95% of that first performance survives. Calling the experience a “subconscious download”, he describes something familiar to anyone who has surprised themselves with their own words. We make things, yet sometimes struggle to explain how they arrived. The distance between those two facts leaves room for a little mystery. Simon’s affection for the stories surrounding his work makes that mystery inviting. The book in his hand and the improvised trumpet give an elusive experience a physical setting: ordinary objects and practical decisions become part of something he could not entirely anticipate. His commentary brings the process alive because he seems interested in what it might reveal, including to himself. Strange Animals considers the contradictions of being human, and its creation offers a modest expression of them: conscious choices shaping material that first appeared without a plan. Simon gives us enough detail to picture the encounter while leaving its deeper workings open. The pleasure lies in that combination of intimacy and wonder, the sense that we can recognise ourselves in an experience without exhausting its meaning.