If a forest could release an EP, I think it would sound like Midori Jaeger’s (Re)planted. Her voice is leaves and sky, her cello is roots and earth, the subtle production is the dappling sun reaching between. Jaeger’s approach is somewhat minimalist; each instrument used in these six songs has a certain amount of room around it, a personal space, and as such is identifiable as its own sedimentary stripe of colour (blue, green, brown). Though, painted with the same brush, these stripes are united: a perfectly homeostatic ecosystem, a landscape.
(Re)planted concerns itself with the big stuff: nature (of course), souls, dreams, time – “time has a scent / it’s on all of our clothes” – but not just lyrically. Its sonics speak of the same notions; the deliberacy of Jaeger’s cello-plucking feels sometimes like a clock, sometimes like a heartbeat, sometimes like rain. These explorations are wide but not overwhelming, like the warm kind of existentialism you get from looking down from the top of a big hill. It doesn’t feel like Jaeger is trying to provide answers. She’s showing you her view.
(Re)planted follows (Un)planted, another EP from earlier in the year. As the titles might suggest, (Re)planted is a return to the style of (Un)planted, but with perhaps a more confident root in its land. There are repeated allusions to endings in (Un)planted and restarts in (Re)planted, but both clearly exist in the same story, chronological or not: Jaeger’s.
Describing the two records, Jaeger’s website likens the artist and her instrument: “The cello itself is an instrument that was once a living tree plucked from the earth. In parallel, the songs express Midori’s own journey as a child growing up in multiple continents, uprooted and forced to build roots on different soils.”
This kinship between Jaeger and cello is apparent in the deeply sensitive style of her playing – the textures she conjures with the single instrument are as palpable as bark on the tree it once was. The two EPs, cleaved apart themselves, are perhaps also a reflection of Jaeger’s diasporic upbringing and in working together as a whole, unite these “different soils” as one musically fertile land.
On (Re)planted, and indeed on (Un)planted, Jaeger is sensitive and headstrong; boldness is not sacrificed to gentleness. These EPs’ forest-sounds come as much from Jaeger’s natural connection to her instrument and practice as it does from the tree a cello used to be. Midori Jaeger has propagated this place with care.
