Golden Green

Color is the entry point here, but color as memory rather than mere description — the specific quality of light on particular occasions, the golden-green of late summer afternoons when the season has achieved its fullest expression and you can feel within it the first faint vibration of coming change. Obel's piano is warmest here of all her compositions — the tone more singing than percussive, voicings that emphasize the resonant sustain of the instrument's lower-middle register. Her voice carries an unusual softness and warmth, the slight breathiness that appears when she is singing from a place of genuine tenderness rather than artistic control. The production is unhurried and luminous, each element given room to ring freely, silence between notes carrying light rather than weight. Emotionally, the song inhabits the specific beauty of moments already colored by the knowledge of their impermanence — not despite this knowledge but because of it, the golden-green made more vivid by the approaching seasonal turn. There is something in Danish and Northern European aesthetics about the intensity of summer, the particular quality of its light in latitudes where the season is brief and therefore precious. Best listened to on exactly the kind of afternoon it describes: late summer, long light, the world at its fullest and most abundant before the turn.