Leslee Smucker

Breathing Landscape was included in Bandcamp’s “Best Experimental Music of February 2024

Recorded in an abandoned water tank in rural northwest Colorado and inspired by Muriel Rukeyser’s circa 1935 poem of the same name, violinist Leslee Smucker explores the range and saturation of intense natural reverb on Breathing Landscape. The artist pushes her instrument to the limit by turns percussive, sweeping, and scraping and, on several tracks, utilizes her own voice as well, resulting in an album that combines breathtaking beauty and visceral texture. Leaning into the meditative quality being present in one moment can provide, this is music you can feel on your skin, calling out from our decomposing modernity into the indifferent sky above. Conjuring deep time but captured in one day, the album is simultaneously immediate and vaporous, primeval sounding yet unapologetically modern.

Press about Breathing Landscape:

A Closer Listen Review

Foxy Digitalis Review

““continuing underground” has an edge, finding beauty within friction and setting it free to float the distance.” -Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis

"Named after a 1930s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, the album titles its tracks with fragments of verse. The speaker of the poem lies in the sun, connected to the landscape but seemingly detached from their human peers. The patterned repetition (still/still, fixed/fixed, each/each) suggests a circling back of ideas. This is matched by Smucker’s violin, which can feel like a process of undecided thought. It sounds out, pauses until silence, and begins pondering once again. 'Silence hangs in the air', curiously, is not a line Smucker recycles. It is not silence but sound that reverberates here. The most fitting title, 'continuing underground', is given to a subterranean, otherworldly piece. Sharp notes are swallowed up by insistent waves of drones, which accrue extra energy in the vacuumous space." – Samuel Rogers, A Closer Listen

"Bowing and scraping, she concentrates on bright, glassy harmonics that reverberate across the space, not so much playing as unleashing them, the same way a fierce wind uproots dust and sends it aloft in clouds and twisters." – Philip Sherburne (Futurism Restated)

"Breathing Landscape glides into the legacy of minimalism but it's a record full of brash precision, one punctuated by flashes of an almost percussive force from the violin. Uniquely created in a specific environment, the album works through a cool combination of location and musician." – Glenn Griffiths (A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed)

"Don’t listen to this music—just feel it. I’m no anatomist, but there must be some point where your ears connect to your tingling spine. At first, I decided that this music deserved to be the soundtrack to a horror film, but then I started relaxing in the warmth of its haunted house effects. And give credit to the abandoned water tower where it was recorded—I don’t think there is a digital software package that can recreate that sound." – Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker) 

Hypnotic Traces is an exploratory album for violin, voice, organ, and antique music boxes. Based around Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard instrument, the recording utilizes organ instead of the traditional piano. Framed around these six melodies are collages of left over and manipulated sound from the recording process, reflecting a friendship with each adjoining melody. To finish the album, Henry Brant’s Quombex for viola d’amore, organ, and music boxes employs a unique chance-melody conglomeration, with the antique music boxes playing together, the organ lazily playing chorales, and the viola d’amore in scordatura harmonic melodies.

Booklet Notes, SoundCloud

Deliquescent is an album that uses violin, voice, tapes, found objects, and a 0-coast synth. It’s about degradation, water, deterioration, and generation loss. (or millennial dread)