Rodman-Melchior, Letha

Rodman-Melchior, Letha

Shimmering Ghost

Siltbreeze

This posthumous release, following last year’s Handbook for Mortals, presents the peak of Letha Rodman-Melchior’s compositional work. Traversing landscapes of affective registers with the organizational ability of Christine Sun Kim and the diversity and intimacy of Throbbing Gristle, Rodman-Melchior re-categorizes objects to find the foreign in the familiar. Moving in and out of focus, her musical patterns themselves grow and become more and more self-aware.  As a response to possession and the human / nonhuman interface, Shimmering Ghost recalls the most moving of performances by Roger Reynolds. It exposes the overlap between senses and suggests that resonance, as distinct from hearing, is a source for beauty beyond sense. And by the use of sense’s special effects, Rodman-Melchior crafts a language that is simply a pleasure. Mary Lattimore’s harp playing at times is reminiscent of Three Musicians’ Music from the Rochester Folk Art Guild, but with urgency heard nowhere else.

Rodman-Melchior, Letha

Handbook For Mortals

Siltbreeze

Known by the alias Tretetam, Letha Rodman-Melchior has released singular sound constructs on CDR and cassette since 2008 on such labels as Ikuisuus and Robert & Leopold. For her first-ever vinyl release, she sheds the veneer of mystery and comes clean with this sweeping haboob of sound, as deft and defying as horns on a hen. From the vantage of time and deep insight, some (i.e. Tom Lax) say Tretetam / Rodman-Melchior’s unique audio gems find a middle ground between United Dairies (notably HNAS) and Vanity Records (ditto Mad Tea Party). But why not the let the artist herself fill you in on the Handbook for Mortals backstory? “From early on, I found that I liked listening to blended sounds of familiar things; TV, lawnmowers, children playing outside. I noticed that when I played records, I wouldn’t flip them over because I found comfort in hearing the needle stuck in its groove. “When I lived in Chinatown on Canal Street in New York, I loved to lay in bed and listen to the vendors shouting, blending with the heavy traffic and tiny wind chimes; I would pretend I was someplace else, somewhere I didn’t know. I love that feeling. “I became interested in field recording after hearing Salmon Run by Graham Lambkin, and had found a website called The Quiet American. I began piecing my tracks together under the name Tretetam, and was influenced by Lambkin, Marcel Türkowsky, Emiliano Maggi, Moondog, Maya Deren’s films and more recently Aaron Dilloway’s Modern...