Veneer is a promise that surfaces make. It is the thin layer that we polish so that the hand does not stick to fragments, the face that we present so that the wound can breathe without being seen. Stephen Upshaw’s first recording understands this double bind with disturbing clarity. In four works, his viola does not seek to anesthetize pain, but studies it as a physical event, as a memory enclosed in muscle and bone, as a story that repeats itself until it becomes survivable. The cumulative effect is that of the self in rehearsal, learning how to push its story forward without collapsing from below.
What unites the program is not style but pressure. Each piece asks how much pressure a body can withstand before it starts speaking in new languages. The color here is not cosmetic. It is bruised, mottled, alive. The expression arrives unapologetically, with attention to the tiniest particle of sound, the way sensation gathers around a nerve before announcing itself as hurt or hope.
Lavinia (2021) by Errollyn Wallen it opens with insistence, a four-note figure that refuses to stay dead. He returns altered, reincarnated, as if given another life every time he risks himself. Music behaves like memory under pressure, replaying a moment to check if it can survive otherwise. The character’s title, taken from Virgil Aeneidshe stands between the faiths, her silence thick with consistency. Wallen reframes this containment as ignition.
When fragments of her aria from Dido’s Ghost surface near the end, they do not resolve anything. They float, they are exposed. The bow is rubbed with grief and submission until the pigment oozes out, hues newly discovered but also eerily familiar. These nuances have always been present, buried beneath stories written by the feet and self-righteous bloodshed of men. Their vanity so cracks to let the old light show.
The New Hymns (2019) by Aaron Holloway-Nahum it turns inward with a different urgency. A low drone holds the ground as microtones rub against it, carving into the silence. The music seems more carved than composed. One perceives the gradual emergence of hands, the curve of a face, the hint of legs stretched on cold stone. What resists completion is the mouth. Speech remains difficult, costly.
When the voice finally flares, it does so faintly, like an ember that refuses to die out at the edge of hearing. The result is reminiscent of a whale’s call translated into fragile poetry, a message destined for distance and deep water. Harmonics drift in, field recordings collide with the grain of the viola, and together they open a corridor to terror. This is not a spectacle. It is the sound of a last spasm offered by a mind that has wandered too far from safety. The hymn becomes young by abandoning consolation.
Soothe a Tooth (2020) by Tonia Ko it is shorter, sharper and no less painful. It takes care of the little violences we do to ourselves without realizing it. Clenched jaws. Cracked enamel. A tongue parched from vigilance. The piece isolates such gestures of tension and release, crawling under the fingernails, behind the eyelids and into the folds of the ear. The touch is confirmed as a syntax. Meaning emerges from friction with material reality and then breaks under the weight of interpretation. Moments of fluidity appear, convincing in their ease, only to dissolve into friction. When the bow bounces, it doesn’t celebrate. It momentarily tests the possibility of defying gravity, knowing that the fall is inevitable.
Trauma lives in the details. It teaches an intimacy with pain that is both precise and exhausting. The treatment also becomes granular. Progress is not measured by leaps but by the ability to notice when the body tightens, when it relaxes, when it remembers too much. Ko’s piece inhabits this realization, where endurance masquerades as normality and relief proves temporary but necessary.
Veneer (2011) by Ed Finnis closes the program by shifting the question. The harmonics form a metaphysical chain, reverberating within the skull through altered resonance and electronic resonance. The sound seems less played out than inhabited. Each tone refracts into another, opening up space where previous works allowed little. Hope enters quietly, without rhetoric. The cells unfold one by one, patiently, almost tenderly, suggesting that new life can arise not by erasing damage but by learning to resonate with it. A pizzicato note emerges, sudden and alive, like an eye opening into an unknown century, curious about where entropy can still offer joy.
Taken together, Glaze suggests that appearances don’t lie. It’s negotiations. They can hide the infection, yes, but they can also protect what hasn’t yet healed. Upshaw’s game understands this paradox. It does not tear the mask. He hears it. In doing so, she reveals how the flesh advances its narratives, not to forget the wound, but to imagine what might still grow around it.
The album is available through Bandcamp here.
