Healing may not be linear, but it is quite often spiral-shaped. We wind round and round and round—approaching incrementally. Forever on the cusp of arriving. We set course for parts unknown only to find that we have inexplicably returned home. And now truths that once seemed obvious or commonplace strike us with a newfound profundity. One such truth reverberates throughout Paige Emery’s Intercommunications — “The body simply asks for love.” It is the concluding line of a spoken word invocation (part poetry, part hypnosis) on the album’s first track, the fittingly-titled “Opening.” Intercommunications explores the possibility of fulfilling this, the body’s ask for love, and the possible worlds that this fulfillment, this nourishment, might inaugurate.

Emery is a Los Angeles-based healer and artist whose practice(s) include herbalism, painting, songcraft, performance, and so-called plant dreaming. Intercommunications functions as a record, but it is also a document of ritual and inquiry, a postcard from her ever-expanding cosmos. Its origins lie in the songs Emery would sing to her plants each morning. (Attention is the seed of love.) And though her singing may have begun as an offering to the plants, words and melodies lingered—the traces of a reciprocal creative relationship. The resulting collection, which begins with “Opening” and concludes with “Decomposing,” traces the cycle of corporeal life (whether the body be plant or human). This same cycle—birth, death, rebirth ad infinitum—corresponds to the trajectory of the healing journey (physical, spiritual) that Emery pursues through plant medicine.

As represented on Intercommunications, healing is recursive and not infrequently fraught. The potential for healing (a potential innate to all beings) is reassuring—joyous, even—but the process itself is winding. Which is to say that Intercommunications is an honest record. This is a healing of stretching, of rot and shedding. The woods are wondrous, dark, and deep, and uncertainty looms. “Calling,” with its eerie chimes and vocal echoes, transmutes the mystery of a bonfire in the distance. The final third of Intercommunications— a triptych comprised of “Swelling,” “Enduring,” and “Decomposing”— feels especially distinct as a movement. The music coils, undulates, and releases with a sigh. At which point we can return to “Opening.” It is morning, the birds are singing, and the journey begins again.

It is no small wonder that all of the music on Intercommunications was produced via a single keyboard, her companion instrument since adolescence. The richness and textural variation, the seemingly emergent syncopated rhythms that flicker into focus and propel the record forward, all are products of Emery’s keen attention to detail. Through meditation, magnification, and music alike we catch glimpses of the complexity guiding this world. A complexity so vast and graceful it approaches simplicity. Call this beauty or call this love. It is present.
-Emmett Shoemaker

• Written and recorded by: Paige Emery
• Mixed by: Briana Marela
• Mastered by: Matthewdavid McQueen
• Photography: Paloma Dooley