All Things Might Spill

For Chantal Michelle, composing music is a form of choreography. Within surreal sonic environments, distinct sounds form relationships—moving together, then drifting apart—in a process of continuous reemergence across the auditory field. This ever-shifting constellation gestures toward the fragility and mutability of perception, a recurring focus in Michelle’s work. Trained as a dancer from an early age, Michelle brings a heightened spatial sensitivity to her practice: an intuitive understanding of how forms coexist and move through three dimensions, and an appreciation for the beauty found in unlikely juxtapositions of materials and ideas. Since establishing her solo career in 2021, she has gained international recognition for her patient, meticulous recordings, often developed in tandem with installations, multi-channel compositions, and sound sculptures. Within these subtly disorienting sonic architectures, new relationships can emerge, new boundaries can be drawn, and listeners are invited into an experience of time that resists linearity.

All Things Might Spill, Michelle’s first album for Shelter Press, is an examination of sustained tension and the mystifying experience of time dilation in the moments just before a rupture or collapse. The music inhabits a space of instability, and even as it uses continuous tones and defined melodic phrases, there’s an air of irresolution—like a moment of unease suspended indefinitely. Much of the album was recorded during the winter months of 2024 in Berlin, with many early-morning hours spent immersed in a space of subtle disquiet. Light is said to spill into darkness, and this transitional time, heavy with expectation, can be heard in the music.

1 Magnetic Field I (01:52)
2 Presence of Border (04:14)
3 Breath Observation (for clarinet) (02:05)
4 The Stream (06:30)
5 Magnetic Field II (02:00)
6 Drying of Frozen Soils (08:32)
7 All Things Might Spill (05:30)
8 Thoughts Like Blocks of Ice (03:38)