Marielle V Jakobsons has cultivated a signature voice sculpted by minimalist, ambient and spiritual traditions. Her recordings, from her early work, with the Date Palms, to the ongoing work with Chuck Johnson in Saariselka, and most definitively with The Patterns Lost to Air show Jakobsons to be an exceptionally skillful sound sculptor, someone who knows the value of patience, and control. An artist able to derive maximum impact from her chosen sound elements. The album was recorded in the studio Marielle built in Oakland, California with huge windows overlooking a backyard of olive and palm trees, nesting towhees, and hummingbirds. The studio’s layout was designed for the albums’ materials of Violin, Fender-Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch.

The Patterns Lost to Air was also born of personal change for Jakobsons brought on by the health effects of long covid, as well as an intentional musical shift from drones to working with scores and written music as she leaned in on her harmonic writing. She could no longer create music in the same way, and this change became the motif for and the name of “The Patterns Lost to Air”. What happens when we release our grip on familiar patterns - in sound, in self, in memory - and allow them to transform in the air around us? How do we move through that to reinvent and renew?

On The Patterns Lost to Air, each piece emerges from a place of necessary restriction, discovering how limitation itself can become a portal to new territories of sound and meaning. The pieces make use of loops and slowly shifting patterns that gracefully decay with time. Through sonic landscapes of Fender Rhodes piano, synthesizers, and strings, the album investigates the space between those patterns like threads of memory, each tone transfiguring and dissolving together. Imagining the forms and shapes that sound takes as its projected into a listening space, and how they are “lost to air” as they morph and decay. This physicality of sound is a theme in her work in general, and this album is directly a conversation on that aspect.

The Patterns Lost to Air’s delicate sounds and intricate harmonies together make for a sweeping shimmering expression. From the ostinato pattern of the synth and the lush strings of the optimistic “Everything lost Remains” Rhodes motifs and washing violins of “Insistence, Without You Inside Time” or “The Salt Rounds”, Jakobsons’ music divines the relief in that release and embraces new frameworks. The Patterns Lost to Air is music to dream with, a work of glistening and delicate beauty.