Stephen Steinbrink - In a Split Mirror Vinyl

Over the past two decades, Stephen Steinbrink has established himself as one of the most distinctive songwriters on the U.S. West Coast, with a rarely matched talent for poetic imagery. It is superficially ironic, then, that such a singular artistic voice should be so closely concerned with how slippery the individual self is: its permutations over a life course, its shifting, shimmering boundaries, and cumulative weight over time. Dreams would seem to offer access to the self in its purest form, shorn of outside influence. Yet in dreams, a steady self is even more elusive than in waking life, as we are just as liable to be transmuted into childhood versions of ourselves as to become another person entirely. In A Split Mirror reckons with the dream of living as an artist today, when the very conditions that might sustain a private artistic life are increasingly eroded by the unrelenting content flood. Dreams, then, serve as a perfect entry point for exploring the contradictory nature of self on Steinbrink’s tenth album, In A Split Mirror.

In A Split Mirror was conceived largely in solitude during recaptured hours at Headlands Center for the Arts, the storied artist residency on a decommissioned military base that Steinbrink helps run. In a 120-year-old basketball court with twenty-foot ceilings overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Steinbrink allowed the scale of the room to alter the album’s sense of time and proportion as he wrote and recorded over the course of two years.

Musically, the album marks a deliberate movement away from the rough-hewn approach of Utopia Teased and Disappearing Coin, toward a new spaciousness, with arrangements that feel minimal, lucid, and open. Steinbrink’s vocal fluidity and meticulous arrangements ebb and flow in intensity and softness, crackle and hiss with emotion and poise, echoing and deepening the uncanny images and sensations that his writing describes. Though featuring contributions from longtime collaborators pianist Andrew Dorsett (LAKE), saxophonist and composer Cole Pulice, drummer Chase Kamp (Body Double), and pedal steel player Nick Levine (Jodi, Al Menne), the album remains primarily a Steinbrink construction: guitar, drum machines, and astonishingly organic synth pads, produced and mixed in a straightforward style, lush and ornate but not glossy. The result is a minimalist movement through genre that has become recognizably Steinbrinkian.

Throughout the album, doubles, mirrors, facsimiles, transformed bodies, and unstable memories recur not as decorative surrealism, but as a symbolic language closer to the truth than stable narration would allow. As Steinbrink asks in the opener “It’s Not My Dream”: “what’s a song if I can’t sell it?” From this dyad—the dream internal and the dream external—In A Split Mirror traces a path through the kaleidoscope of the self. On the three-part suite “Calcified,” a surreal image provokes an existential ache when he wakes up from “the dream, that my father was a boat,” and wonders next, “is my true nature going to change?” before dissolving into an aeriform drone of Casio, saxophone and cello. With “I’m a Swimming Pool,” as guitars and piano shimmer and flow in ornate cascades, Steinbrink evokes the dissolution of self that can come from total immersion in a scene: the taste of chlorine leading to union with the pool, the mind “alkaline,” the self “rippling.” In the recursively psychedelic “I’m a Worm”, the “I” shifts from pool to apple, the narrator occupying both sides of the antinomy of part and whole, first singing “if the world is an apple, I guess that I am the core,” then revising it to “if the world is an apple, I guess that I am a worm.”

The album’s central refraction point is, appropriately enough, “Magic Mirror,” where Steinbrink most directly addresses the trickiest aspect of the self: its ineluctable tendency to change. One’s past identity is encountered as a doppelgänger when, similarly but no longer selfsame, “an image melts into a scene / of a person in two thousand three / who looks suspiciously like me.” Once one’s own memory takes on the uncanny quality of a dream—distorting it but no less true—Steinbrink is led to ask: “have I always been two human beings?” Memories as distorting mirages come to the fore in the nearly slow-core “Driving Around in Arizona,” which finds Steinbrink in a more sociological mode, less frequently deployed but one of his most powerful. He returns to the arid exurbia of his youth and incisively captures how “subtle violence” of the built landscape causes a spiritual deformation, and how “it caused so many good people to isolate themselves from community; to isolate themselves from the face of love.” He tangles emotional geography with psychic economy, showing how memory at once shapes and shrouds the self, especially when re-encountering the places and faces that first shaped his identity: “pulling the thread on your history / you find someone you could never be.” The images, like energy, “can transform but never disintegrate.” A resolution of sorts is found in the airy closing track “Opening Windows in May,” the self aligning finally in a concrete present, rendering an integrated picture of one part of the planet, anchored in time through the seasons’ rhythms and rituals.

In A Split Mirror suggests that identity may be least true when it seems most coherent, and Steinbrink finds much greater value from what is available when refracted, misremembered, or dissolved into its surroundings. Rather than resolve these fractures, the album lingers inside them, attentive to the strange continuities that survive life’s transformation. The beauty of his work lies in its fidelity to instability: what is most fragile and mutable in a person is also what remains most vivid.

Sedimentary Archive, the new imprint from Berlin-based label Mansions and Millions, launches with Stephen Steinbrink’s In A Split Mirror as its first release. Mansions and Millions has been shaped by Berlin's underground community of left-field pop musicians, its catalog growing from a specific social and artistic scene of friends and collaborators. Sedimentary Archive carries that sensibility into a wider frame, creating space for idiosyncratic pop music made outside its immediate geography.

Mastered by Chuck Johnson. Artwork by Nicole Lavelle.
Released by Sedimentary Archive, a division of Mansions & Millions.