For close to twenty years, Trixie Whitley has been writing songs at the kitchen table of her Brooklyn apartment. It is where much of ‘Folded Time’, her new album out October 23 on Unday Records, first took shape: somewhere between instinct and control, two forces Whitley has spent much of her life moving back and forth between.
“I didn't really have a very specific map other than I had to listen to my body,” she says of making the record. More often than not, her body told her to play drums. Whitley plays drums, bass, guitar and piano across ‘Folded Time’, and rhythm runs through its nine songs like a nervous system. Opener ‘Carry’ slowly pulls itself out of the mud on heavy drums as “I carry what I can and I work with what I got” becomes a mantra. Elsewhere, her love of polyrhythm runs loose through the improvised ‘Fascinating and Fun’, while ‘Carnaval’ erupts into what she calls a “drum rave”.
The bulk of the album was recorded at JET Studio in Brussels, with Whitley continuing to shape the songs at home in Brooklyn and in Montréal. That movement feels fitting for a record concerned with the different versions of ourselves we carry along. Whitley is a mother and a daughter, looking back at the girl she once was while considering the woman she is still becoming. Heartbreak, desire, motherhood and forgiveness pass through these songs, but ‘Folded Time’ never settles neatly into any one of them. Past and present keep folding into each other.
Whitley has often been told that she is “a bit much for a tiny body”. Here, she seems increasingly uninterested in making herself smaller. The tension between vulnerability and force, precision and abandon is everywhere: in the way ‘Desire Is Movement’ circles permanence and impermanence, in the raw pulse of ‘Building Fences’, and especially in the drums that keep pushing these songs forward.
“I struggle with my own power,” Whitley says. “That’s also been a lot of this journey the last couple of years: facing my own power and not being so afraid of her, the girl I was, the woman I’ve become.”
Twenty years on, the Brooklyn kitchen table is still there. So are all those earlier versions of herself. On ‘Folded Time’, Whitley isn't trying to leave them behind. She is making room for all of them.
