- I really don't mean the following as an insult, but it’s difficult to imagine The Letter String Quartet without a collaborator. Their angular and skeletal creations demand someone to come along and lay something soothing over the raw, bare bones. The thoughtful and often playfully eerie presence of Marita Dyson is a balm here, on this dusty, historical song cycle that is also their debut album.

Actually, it’s also difficult to imagine a more perfectly crafted invitation to collaborate. The librettist for this little collection is Maria Zajkowski and she has created a series of odes to the history of The Abbotsford Convent, once a place of  religious retreat for lives lived in contemplation and solitude, before it became a significant artistic hub. This must surely have been an enticement that Marita Dyson would’ve found hard to turn up. As vocalist for The Orbweavers Dyson has always drawn on her other gig as historian and librarian to infuse her singer-songwriter craft with little-recalled historical facts and the slowly decaying atmosphere of the past. Late track, the coquettish Momento Mori (sic.) is the most elegant symbol imaginable for all this. A little dance round death, as a woman - a nun?- plunges silkworms to their boiling demise, the price exacted for her seamstress work; once an unthinking element in the process of creation and now a reminder of mortality: “I used to value all those worldly dresses / But now the only feeling / Is the texture of a deathbed.”

Compellingly, almost inappropriately gloomy as it is, that number is a bit over-the-top when compared to the rest of what All The Stories has on offer. More often it offers a wistful inspection of lives lived in tight confines, a psychological binding that ties down anxiety into quiet vocals and a roiling, geometric accompaniment from the quartet, suggesting inner turmoil, strapped down and controlled. Opener Days Of Thought is a good example. Memory and desire, loss and control are presented elliptically but inescapably: “Days of thought / I understand / absence and constance” the hallmarks of a life of contemplation and self-denial. It’s interesting, although this is clearly an evocation of someone else’s struggle, it’s hard not to relate these songs to the very similar but intimately personal gestures of artists like Jenny Hval or Evelyn Ida Morris, whose painful journeys of self-revelation are draped across their discographies. True history or not, All The Stories is a worthy companion to the work of those artists.

Elsewhere, death begins to quietly invade these spiritual soliloquies, as in the record’s title track. A soulful sublimation is also a self-dissolution in lyrics like “In the rock I hide my essence / For the futures sown astray / Stretch my hand into the grass and watch myself just fly away.” Quietly beautiful and a pressage of mortality in equal measure.

Every now and then the quartet will shed their rhythmic bonds and, as Marita just enthused, simply take off. See the choruses to Same But Swallowed for example, evoking that desire to flee and live a fuller, emotionally compelling life. These moments, especially since there are so few of them are glorious and captivating.

When I think about it, a work created through commissions, combined with institutions and collaborations could easily have been a lifeless exercise in art created by committee. All The Stories is indeed trapped halfway between life and death, but it uses that as a frisson, producing a quiet energy, an engaging psychodrama that exposes the silent prisons that can still hold us all, to one degree or another. Marita and The Letter String Quartet, life and death, collaborate here through a bond of sublimated desire and they do it most effectively.

- Chris Cobcroft.