The Patterns Lost to Air

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Marielle V Jakobsons has cultivated a signature voice molded 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, a musician who knows the value of patience and control. An artist able to derive maximum impact from her chosen sound elements, the album's layout is shaped by three primary voices of violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch and was recorded in 2024 in the studio Jakobsons built in Oakland, California, its huge windows overlooking a backyard with olive and palm trees, nesting towhees and hummingbirds.

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 classical training, and harmonic writing. It was more than an evolution, it was a need to redefine who and what she was, down to the molecular level, because she could no longer create music in the same way, which became a galvanizing motif for 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. Jakobsons notes, “This renewal and loss and transformative cycle is something I believe transcends the story of the illness.” The pieces make use of loops and slowly shifting patterns that gracefully decay with time, settling steadily from one movement to the next. 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.

The album revels in dissipation as the tendrils of melody physically change the air and sound travels steadily back into quietude. Jakobsons composed imagining the forms and shapes that sound takes as they are 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, but this album is a more direct conversation and exploration into how sound, air, and physical space interact.

The spectral compositions of The Patterns Lost to Air are tidepools of sound, brimming with life and mystery. The 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” to the dappled Rhodes motifs and washing violins of “Insistence” and “Without You Inside Time,” Jakobsons' music divines the relief in release and embraces new frameworks. The Patterns Lost to Air is music to dream with, a work of glistening and delicate beauty.