At times Beirut can seem a little esoteric. Zach Condon dropped out of high school at 17 and worked at a movie theater specialising in international films. There he learned about Fellini arias, Sicilian funeral brass and Balkan music. After returning from Europe, he studied Portuguese and photography at the University of New Mexico. Staying true to his sense of finding his own pathways, the new Beirut album, A Study of Losses, follows its own unique course while rigorously avoiding the well-trodden path.
The project was commissioned by the Swedish contemporary circus, Kompani Giraff to be played in conjunction with acrobatic performers. Based on an adaptation of Judith Schalanky’s novel, An Inventory of Losses, the circus uses a theme of disappearance as the starting point for their performance. Legacies and culture left behind fed into stories of people and places that no longer seem to exist. The disappearance of ancient scriptures, animals like the Caspian tiger, even a South Pacific atoll serve as the fodder for Condon’s musical vision.
The mystery and marvel plays right into the album’s unique instrumentation. Blending ukelele, two types of accordion and pump organ, along with multiple synths Condon creates a mixture of elements that recalls indiepop, folktronica, ambient, medieval and Renaissance music, while still sounding exclusively like Beirut. Combining 11 vocal tracks with seven instrumental themes played in conjunction with a string quartet, Condon explains, “I titled them with the lunar seas inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations where they collect on the moon, who realizes all too late the life he has lost in the process.”
Capturing moods combining a man’s ill-fated discovery of a unicorn fossil using the bones of everything from a wooly mammoth to narwahl, Condon uses a modular synth to reintegrate ‘”‘Guericke’s Unicorn’. Yet there are obvious problems as he questions, “How could this thing / make any sense?” One of the instrumental pieces, ‘Mare Crisium’, explores the stringed interplay between the ukelele and string quartet, illustrating how in the right hands instruments that might seem absurd in combination actually achieve amazing heights.
Beirut have continually examined pathways far from the beaten track, finding a sense of magic, where misery and majesty combine to form sounds and sensibilities just outside the everyday. With A Study of Losses the esoteric world of Zach Condon reaches new heights.