The heart-on-sleeve message that coats the back of Pondfire’s jacket is a truth many of us lost in the American malaise have witnessed: they paved paradise and put up a house farm. The creeks, meadows and corn, fields of a suburban youth now the playthings to little houses made of ticky tacky where lots are the size of Brooklyn apartments. But at least there is green space! And peace! Yet Paul Beauchamp’s story contends that the silence of the countryside was never peaceful, even before the arrival of the commuter class. Now residing in a land of a thousand upheavals, Beauchamp has left behind North Carolina’s agricultural past for Italy’s sound-perfect future. Yet the memories of his youth, as it happens with so many wise composers, are instilled in current work. Pondfire sounds like reminisces. Each song a simple ambient tip of the cap to those natural sounds that captured Beauchamp’s ears in youth, and still rattle around in the present. How those sounds become echoes that resonate with the rest of us is a question better left to pop psychologists than a lowly reviewer, but know that Pondfire isn’t some lost boy in nostalgic meditation. Though it pays respect to Beauchamp’s grandfather and his youth, it does stay stuck in thought. It’s a dynamic, shifting view of drone that just so happens to also speak loudly about the feeling inside all of us that portions of our lives may be gone, but hardly forgotten.
