Council - This day, every day Council

Bedroom Community welcomes Council, the collaborative project of Gabriel Kahane and Pekka Kuusisto.

Council brings together two artists who have spent their careers refusing easy categories. American singer-songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane has built a singular body of work spanning song, contemporary classical music and orchestral writing, collaborating with artists from Sufjan Stevens and Phoebe Bridgers to the San Francisco Symphony. Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is equally difficult to contain: an internationally celebrated soloist, conductor and champion of new music whose practice moves freely through contemporary composition, folk traditions, electronics and improvisation. Together, they make something neither would make alone.

The seeds of Council were planted in 2015, when Kuusisto met Kahane and immediately began quizzing him about a tiny orchestration detail on one of his records. Kahane’s first reaction was essentially: who is this guy? A year later, after performing together in Helsinki, he was “immediately smitten by his sound, his musicianship, his whole vibe.” Long-distance collaborations became writing retreats in Finland and the United States, and over the following decade a shared musical language took shape. This Day, Every Day is its first full-length document. Across twelve tracks, piano, guitar, acoustic and electric violin, harmonium, percussion, electronics and close, finely shaped vocals form a sound world that can be intimate one moment and violently expansive the next. The songs move between private experience and the wider pressures of contemporary life: mental illness, grief, memory, friendship, fatherhood, war, political disillusionment and the psychological exhaustion of the digital age.

Opening single “Panic (feat. Elizabeth Ziman)” establishes the album’s central impulse:

This is the part I’ve taught myself to leave out - Well not anymore. That willingness to expose what is normally concealed runs throughout the record. “Tetris” places fighter pilots killing time between missions against a relentlessly propulsive violin figure. “Crawlspace” turns intimacy into something dreamlike and subterranean. “mirrorworld,” featuring synth and drum programming by Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso, enters the distorted reality of conspiracy, online performance and information overload. Elsewhere, “The End of Days Inn” asks uncomfortable questions about the artist’s own complicity in the systems they criticise.

The album was co-produced with Kahane’s longtime collaborator Joseph Lorge, whose subtle interventions help shape its unusually tactile sound; additional guests include Elizabeth Ziman, Eliza Bagg, Samuli Kosminen, Logan Strosahl and Ted Poor.

For Kuusisto, Council is “the two of us trying to make sense of a number of things by exposing vulnerable parts of ourselves to each other.” The result is a record that is tender in both senses of the word: gentle and comforting, but also raw, exposed and painful to the touch.