Kristen Gallerneaux’s Life Day unfolds as a sonic study in recurrence. Not repetition in any formal or minimalist sense, but more a return to a condition: a pulse, a signal, a state of suspended awareness that doesn’t fully resolve into stable time. The album’s six tracks don’t so much sit alongside as flow into each other, like unstable signals rather than discrete transmissions. They feel less composed than remembered, as though surfacing from within a foggy haze.
Across the album, rhythms persist with a curious insistence. They suggest a heartbeat, but just as readily the automated continuity of machines. Life here is never singular. It is doubled, distributed across bodies and systems, signals and supports. What emerges is music that is atmospherically close to a monitored state in which bodily presence is partial, mediated, and constantly measured. The hospital – although central to this album’s narrative – is never explicitly depicted, but its logic is everywhere: life as data-flow, tracked and sustained, uncannily prolonged.
The first track, ‘Every day’ begins with birds, but quickly folds inward: the inside of a piano or a hospital. There is the soft crunch of earth or footsteps, wind chimes, a muffled piano phrase repeating, not in the stabilising logic of minimalism, but closer to surrealism, where repetition disorients rather than anchors. A voice briefly appears, “every day, every day,” pitched down, stretched, as if dragged through tape. Time thickens. For several minutes, the track hovers in a fog of semi-consciousness. Then, suddenly, it lifts. A breezier rhythm enters, the phrase “every day” returns as a loop, more stable now, more legible. It’s difficult not to hear this as a transition from spaceless stasis into a world that reasserts continuity. Maybe not awakening, but re-entry. A shift from suspension into sequence.
Like much of Gallerneaux’s work, birdsong permeates this album. But it rarely settles into something pastoral or natural, feeling closer to a lure or encryption. Gallerneaux has written about EVP pioneer Friedrich Jürgenson first hearing the phantom ‘voice’ of his dead wife while playing back tape recordings of birds. Here too, birds seem to draw the listener in, only as a pretence to reveal something else, another layer, hidden beneath.
‘Sun to sun’ takes up the pulse more explicitly. A steady heartbeat anchors the track, edged by resonant atmospheres, dubby but indistinct. More birds, or bird-like whistles, flicker at the periphery of the sound. Hi-hats and delayed percussion accumulate, building propulsion without resolving or climaxing. A breathy voice emerges, rhythmic, mantra-like, yet distant and alienated. The track expands into a woozy, almost orchestral swell, strings rising against a persistent low-frequency tone. The birds and voices never fully enter the centre, but hover at the periphery, like radio static. The piece dissolves rather than ends.
‘Second life’ opens more assertively, with a steady rhythm and organ-like figure quickly overtaken by distended accordion tones. The ubiquitous heartbeat returns, muffled but expansive, as surrounding beats flicker in and out of the mix in counterintuitive ways, building toward nowhere, pausing and restarting as if recovering from interruption. There is a strange grandeur here: soaring and impressionistic, not far at times from the narcotic drift of what used to be called ‘heroin house’, the enveloping blankness of Flying Saucer Attack’s ‘rural psychedelia’. or the Kranky-adjacent haze of early 2000’s post-shoegaze groups like Bowery Electric. Music that already existed in the aftermath of something. That sense is sharpened here by the ubiquity of the pulse, which marks both life itself and the systems sustaining it. At twelve minutes, the track, the album’s longest, stretches into something like a temporal field. The title, ‘Second life’ suggests existence after rupture, a life split into before and after, where the second bears traces of the first without belonging to it. Brain injury here feels less like damage than a filter: a form of altered signal processing, or a neurological effect chain through which perception is routed and rerouted.
‘Quarter life maintenance’ reduces things further. A slow, stumbling beat anchors the track. Oozing low-frequency drones moving in slow motion like quicksand. In this track, and throughout, the beats persist with indifferent regularity, sometimes curiously anachronistic. Simple, unfussy, often just a kick and snare, operating almost non-diegetically, cleaner than the morass beneath. Perhaps belonging to a different time and place.
All across the album, elements return. It is a sound full of references, but not in a nostalgic way. Rather, moments feel like they emanate from an archive where past and present collapse into each other. Scattered throughout are acoustic instruments: fiddle, accordion, banjo, which Gallerneaux treats both as musical tools to play, and as ‘haunted’ objects whose voices carry traces of previous lives, previous uses.
Gallerneaux’s writing frequently circles obsolete or marginal media: radio transmissions, early synth prototypes, EVP recordings, not as relics, but as sites where time folds in on itself. There is a recurring gesture of bringing something back into contact with itself across time through layers of mediation. In this sense, Life Day is hauntological. Not in the familiar register of longing for lost pasts or futures. But more in its concern with persistence: of bodies, of signals, of sonic artefacts that continue beyond their source.
The album is suffused with what Gallerneaux has described in her writing as “thickened moments,” where sound coagulates into a kind of protoplasmic medium between the living and the dead. Drones, bells, and low thuds evoke not just ambience but a latent sense of dread. The feeling that something has already happened, or is about to. If there is a genre reference that holds, it may be horror. Not as narrative, but as atmosphere.
Life Day emerges from an annual ritual marking survival. Gallerneaux makes these recordings each 19 April, on the anniversary of a sudden and near-fatal medical event, from which she rather miraculously survived, but not unscathed. The framing is difficult to ignore and inevitably shapes how the work is heard. Yet the music itself resists containment by that narrative. It does not offer testimony or closure. If anything, this album holds the listener within a more ambiguous condition: not life after death, but life continuing under altered terms.
Listening to this, it’s difficult not to think of the soundscapes of hospitals. The steady rhythms of machines, the compression of time, and the claustrophobic enclosure of bodies within systems. Having recently spent extended periods in such environments myself, there is something uncannily familiar here. The feeling of being alive, but reduced to a monitored body. Of consciousness lagging in the wake of the technological processes that sustain it. Gallerneaux has described herself as being “contaminated” by her research, and that contamination is audible here. Sound doesn’t simply represent, but vibrates with a spooky resonance: where frequency and meaning don’t align. Life Day doesn’t resolve these ambiguities, but leaves the listener suspended within them, between life and death, and whatever continues after.
Joel Stern is an artist and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the collective Machine Listening, and from 2012-2022 was Director of Liquid Architecture.
