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Sarah Page
Dose Curves
Backward - 2019
Michael Panontin
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You may know Sarah Page as a long-time member of versatile roots rockers the Barr Brothers, but there is so much more to the Montreal harpist. For Page and her instrument, it was quite literally love at first sight. "I fell in love with the harp the moment I saw it. It was being played by Harpo Marx in a Marx Brothers film," she told CM. "I was already completely enthralled with that hilarious, mysterious, charismatic man and when I saw him sit down and I heard the sound of the instrument, I felt totally transported."
Though she begged her parents to let her play the harp, they had no idea where to find one let alone someone to teach it to her. It wasn't until years later, as a student at Vanier College - of classical guitar as it turned out - that Page finally got her big chance. "I was sitting in a music history class one day, listening to a Berlioz symphony," she remembers, "and I heard the sound of the harp and I remembered in a flash that playing the harp was what I had always wanted to do with my life."
Fast forward a bit to 2019 and Page's first solo harp recording, the mesmerizing Dose Curves. The five tracks here - ranging from eastern-tinged ambience to nearly full-on industrial drone - would appear to be quite a leap for both the budding composer and her 5,000-year-old instrument. But, as she is keen to point out, the process was much more of a gradual one.
"I haven't been working on these pieces in a direct way for eight years but I have been crafting my sound and preparations on the harp for that length of time," she said. "I've gone through many amps, pickups, pedals and setups to get a sound I'm happy with and now it's really my own. I started performing some tracks a few years ago but it was really when I built a magnetic pickup for my bass strings a couple of years ago that the whole album came together."
At a terse four minutes and fifteen seconds, 'Lithium Taper' is hardly the record's most obvious standout track. The untrained ear might find it hard to locate any harp at all amidst the piece's flittering electronics. But it illustrates Page's musical vision as well as anything. Page takes a single string and then passes it through a plethora of amps and devices to create a uniquely captivating sound. "It's more of a solo for my electronics than it is for the harp," she said. "I microsampled a single harp string and somehow the sampled note being from an organic source rather than a digital one makes the track sound like there's more air in it than if it had been from say a synthesizer."
Elsewhere on Dose Curves, there is plenty to like for those looking for the sort of blissed-out zones the harp is so uniquely capable of, like the Zen-like 'Pleiades' or the quietly fetching 'Ephemeris Data', the latter a particular favourite of Page's, which she claims allows her to "rekindle that virtuosic connection I had with my harp".
Dose Curves is a thoroughly Montreal affair, recorded at that city's legendary Hotel2Tango Studio and engineered and produced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Thierry Amar. Fans of the vibrant experimental scene up there would do well to check this record out.
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Backward
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