The album’s subtext, “Soundtracks for the Bardos,” swam into focus soon after, when Baird’s mother was given a terminal prognosis and Baird moved temporarily from New York City to Decatur, Illinois to care for her. “For the following six months, I would work on assembling, arranging, and creating these sounds in the quiet moments while she slept,” they’d go on to write. “The live performance of Bearings, combined with the experience of caretaking for my mother and witnessing their death, fomented this record.”
In musical form, Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos is a series of 11 “Gates,” each representing a stage in the passage from death to whatever comes next. These states are represented in terrifying yet sublime fashion here, comprising monolithic drones, claustrophobic loops, and the unsavory sounds that skitter across their margins.