With Smelter, Faith Coloccia and Daniel Menche chart out an acoustic landscape where the boundaries of memory, geography, and sound melt away, quietly underlining the transformative potential of collaboration. Recorded between 2017 and 2024, the album unfolds through field recordings that focus intimately on water—its cycles, permutations, and presence as both medium and metaphor. Listeners will encounter echoes of snow, icemelt, creeks fading beneath ferryboats, rain, and submerged voices, all mingling in richly layered textures that at times feel almost tangible. Coloccia’s methods lean into spontaneity, often capturing sounds as fleeting incidents while accompanied by her son; these moments are edited with care, preserving the enigmatic presence of voices without betraying intimacy.

Menche, conversely, brings a hunter’s precision to environmental recording, setting out on full-day excursions to meticulously document aural phenomena with clear intent. The album’s genesis lies in the handoff of five of Coloccia’s piano compositions, which Menche reshaped and augmented into long-form drones. These threads, intertwined with their collective fieldwork, result in compositions that drift between clarity and murk, the abstraction of water’s state mirroring the unpredictability of memory.

What’s remarkable is the sense of continuity achieved between distinct recording approaches—high-fidelity clarity and lo-fi immediacy become indistinguishable, woven together into an immersive environment that pays homage to both place and time. Smelter thus emerges as a kind of time capsule: a collection of sonic photographs, each piece holding a unique vision of place and the subtle passage of seasons, fulfilled in a drone-based, almost cinematic unfolding. As one listens, sedimentary loops gather and dissolve, creating beauty that’s ephemeral, sometimes ungraspable, yet deeply affecting.

This aural journey holds a distinct humility, never striving for grand gestures but instead inviting reflective presence. By centering the artistry of listening itself, Coloccia and Menche offer a multifaceted document—fragments of lived experience refracted through a quietly innovative compositional lens. Smelter invites repeated exploration, its atmospheres yielding new details in each encounter and echoing the approach of authors who move fluidly between criticism, theory, and deep listening.