Staubitz and more recently Waterhouse have been a dynamic force in the vibrant New England improvisation scene for a while now, constantly performing, organizing shows, building on long-running collaborations and seeking out new ones. And then the pandemic hit, forcing them to hunker down and reassess their music. Waterhouse thinks back on how that impacted their working together. “Being isolated together gave us time to talk about ideas and especially early in the pandemic, time to work on them. I am grateful for that. The pandemic accelerated our development as a creative unit. We moved in together only a few months before the pandemic started. We hadn't even been dating for a year. The pandemic forced us to grow and learn about each other very quickly.” Staubitz adds, “We’ve both been doing this separately for a long time, set in our ways — luckily, our ways balance each other. COVID just gave us time and space to work more, to the point where we'd take breaks between projects to ‘be a couple’ until we got bored with that and got back to work. If anything, having that space and time solidified our Working Couple dynamic.” 

Live performance gave way to a more internalized approach to listening and capturing the isolation of the pandemic world. The two began recording and releasing periodic missives captured in and around their home in Pawtucket. Waterhouse remembers that “we went out at night a few times to capture that eerie silence and sense of emptiness. To be honest it was much easier to make interesting recordings early in the pandemic. The world felt completely different. Everybody was at home. When we would go out to make recordings, we hardly saw anybody, day or night.” And of course, the two dove deep into the duo format during the height of COVID lockdown curating and releasing a staggering 78 collaborations with their Distant Duos project which threw musicians together from across their expansive musical network. (Note: I was invited to work on a piece for the series.) Those experiences set the stage for Common Metals which zeros in on the sounds of the everyday and the way they resonate in their environments. 

The credits for the CD note “Recordings by Mary, mix/edit by Russ” which played out like this. Two of the four tracks were recorded by Staubitz at work in Seekonk, MA where she would “zone out to the machine sounds and get lost in them — a brain vacation from people I couldn't relate to and a hamster wheel of a job that was crushing me, physically and mentally.” The other two were captured when she was visiting a friend in Newfane, VT. She recalls “It struck me — way after the fact, because when I recorded, I was just thinking ‘cool sounds, better record it’ —that I was surrounded by machines everywhere I went, whether it was in a windy parking lot in Massachusetts or between the woods and a river in Vermont. And I’d never thought that much about it. And I felt like a machine, myself, at that time, dead inside and plugging in an employee number into a time clock. Clockwork orange.” 

Waterhouse adds “I suppose I was more of a “producer” for this album. We hadn’t done anything in a while and we were burnt out. Mary was working at Target and I was working for a contractor. It was winter. Mary told me about some of the sounds at work and I encouraged her to capture them. At some point Mary reminded me that she had a new batch of recordings, so I downloaded them and checked them out… When I first heard the recordings, it was obvious I didn’t need to do much to put together a good record. I came up with the sequence based on two considerations — holding the listener's attention for as long as possible and what felt “right”… I often think of album structure and dynamics visually. You can push a listener in one direction for so long, but at some point, you need to let up and switch gears. For these four pieces I believe this is the only sequence that works. Fortunately, Mary agreed!” 

For those familiar with the economical, searing blast of Staubitz’s solo work as Donna Parker, the dull, insistent rumble of “Septic” that kicks off the disc mines a similar vein; five minutes of pulsing, idling clamor that kicks in and just sits with relentless reverberance with only the briefest interjection of muffled voices about half-way in until it hits a hard cut. The sound field is flat and forward and enveloping. The seven-minute “Runoff” follows, capturing snow melting from a metal roof in Vermont. But this is not the bucolic sounds of nature. Instead, the resonant, percussive sounds of the snow hitting the roof sit against an encroaching background of road noise and passing airplanes which move in and out of focus against the irregular pattering. 

“Worker Drone” follows, kicking off with the thudding crash and whining machine-hum of a cardboard baler. The piece builds over the course of 13 minutes, from the repeated, measured cadence of thunders and crashes as the baler is loaded up, followed by the hydraulic wail of the crushing mechanism. The tension and release of the abrasive onslaught mounts, breaking a third of the way through into the low whirr of an industrial fan, the distant chatter of warehouse workers and general warehouse ambience. And then in the final minute, that whine of the baler kicks in again, ending as the machine noise ramps down to silence. 

The longest piece, “Dishintegration” captures the domestic machine sounds that constantly surround us. Staubitz notes that the sound is from her friend’s fifty-year-old dishwasher which is so loud that it drowns out everything when it is running. Here, she captures that notion of refocusing commonplace experiences into provocative listening. The timbral and textural depth of every buzz, clatter, motor oscillation, gurgle and splash is magnified, engulfing the sonic plane. What would be mundane in a small dose takes on an immersive listening experience as the machine methodically progresses through its routine cycle. Here, background domestic ambience develops its own compositional arc, churning along and then finally winding down with a low thrum and shudder, leaving an empty silence. Staubitz reflects on her approach, observing “Be here, in this place, for a few minutes, outside of the place you're in right now. Sometimes a place will offer a perfect natural composition that frames a depth of field and it's pure accident.” Waterhouse sums up the release nicely. “It's as if the world handed us a record and we just had to finesse it to completion. Mary was the conduit.”