The Slaves are by no means the first band in town to be engaged in ambient
experimentalism. Cocteau Twins-esque ethereal looping makes for some of the best music in Portland—Grouper, Benoit Pioulard, and Bird Costumes, just to name a few. Yet while most artists of the ilk are flying solo, The Slaves are composed of a couple. I think this very coupledom is what makes Birch and Barbara exceptional even amongst their exceptional peers.
Barbara likes to call their music “ambient gothic surf,” and this phrase isn't so far off. Even as the listener floats upon their expansive soundscapes, something gothic creeps beneath the surface that pulls at the heart and sobers the mind. Yet after charting out their musical territory as such, what can we make of song titles like “Love May Set Sail,” “You Could Save Me,” and “When You Make Love to Me”? These titles seem much more the fodder of romantic pop. The answer lies in their live show: when one actually experiences The Slaves, the fact of their romantic connection as a duo is the foundation of the project's genius. This does not at all amount to saying that they make a cute couple (although, as an aside, they quite do). Rather, it is that The Slaves seem to delve headlong into what is problematic—difficult even, wrenching even—about loving someone of the opposite sex, even as they announce and champion a love enduring.
They do this not necessarily in lyrics, but as performance artists might: they show it in the movement of their bodies onstage and let these movements infuse the mood of the music. Birch howls into his collection of mics, which he literally devours into his mouth from time to time, or holds them out with his arms arrow-straight as though he were a conjurer with rain sticks. He doubles over onto his guitar into a fetal position, and crawls around the stage intensely over various pedals. These acts find their opposite in Barbara, who sits serenely behind her Roland keyboard and laptop and sends out calm vocal harmonies as though through a mist. If what the duo is plotting, to use their own definition again, is music that is “trippy but stationary,” it is Birch that is taking a journey (to play a bit with the word “trippy”), and Barbara that is stationary. Birch is an Orpheus-like figure, yearning and penetrating the fog with bombastic vigor. He's madly, desperately searching for Barbara, while she is the patient soul and source of powerful stillness. Her stillness exists as a temple, and it must exist that way to balance out Birch's chaos. Her sweet feminine wit and patient bravery exists even as Birch, in a state of perpetually agonized collapse, howls for her. What he offers is primitive, aggressive, and exists outside categories. She calls back, but it's measured and comforting. It's a reminder that she exists as a bearer to he whose burden needs lifting.
It's almost as if the Slaves, whether they're aware of it or not, are playing out a glorious mythology about men and women, in the contrasting ways that the two genders approach the world. They cut at the quick of romantic interactions and express something meaningful about what it's like to revel in love and despair in love in turn, as rhythmically as the seasons shift. Somewhere between her eyes and the curve of his back lies their chemistry, and the most beautiful moments are those in which their mutual sorrowful insistence softens the contrast between their approaches. The duo, in those moments, becomes unified and indistinguishable, in total romantic harmony.
