The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depth of the Sea
The Salt Doll Went To Measure the Depth of the Sea is the fifth full-length studio album by American indie-folk band The Low Anthem, released on February 23, 2018 on Joyful Noise Recordings. It was composed by Ben Knox Miller in the days following a traumatic automobile accident that devastated the band, sending members to the hospital and destroying their instruments. "I remember looking at the burning van wrapped around a steel pole and knowing it was the end . I wasn't hurt so I rented a box truck and packed up all our broken instruments and drove them from D.C. to Providence. That night I was reading Kay Larsen's biography of John Cage, Where the Heart Beats, and came across the Salt Doll fable. I have found several versions of the Salt Doll story, but all basically tell the story of a doll that wants to know the ocean. The ocean says 'come in.' It puts its toe in, and knows something, but loses its toe. Puts its foot in, knows more, but loses its foot... and so on. I began to imagine its journey, and 16 days later the first version of album was written and recorded." After Jeff Prystowsky recovered the rendered the final version of.the album together. "I don't know what kind of headspace I was in for those 16 days," Knox-Miller wrote of The Salt Doll's... rapid composition. "I was alone. All of my regular instruments were destroyed. I had a parlor acoustic , a 64-key piano and a '90s era DA-88 digital 8-track tape machine in my bedroom. I had been using it to record abstract instrumental tracks, produced by processing beats physically cut into the center loops of vinyl records. My turntable was running 24 hours a day and I set up a signal chain with crossovers and guitars pedals and electronic and physical filters, and the room was filled with continuous hypnotic sound. I think of the music as made of circles," he wrote. "There is a safe sense of time, but some of the space that is opened up is so bare as to be nearly uncomfortable. Amongst ourselves we call the sound 'subtle energy circularism.' A lot of the sounds on Salt Doll comes from tiny sources, like a chopstick scraping the rim of a brown paper bag or a record needle bouncing in a divot."
