On Birthday Party, Brooklyn-based composer Cassie Wieland (aka Vines) braids poignant, rich instrumentals with sparing lyrics. It’s a new, deeply personal direction for the composer, whose previous music was primarily written for others to play. Here, her own voice, diffused by the feathery touch of a vocoder, is front and center; her economical words stem from the loneliness you might feel on your birthday, where long gone memories and nostalgia feel their most acute. From these thoughts, Wieland weaves lush, contemplative tapestries, finding catharsis in fuzzed-out melodies.
Across her practice, Wieland’s music shines a light on knotty feelings that are hidden just under the surface. Her piece HYMN, which is a collaborative work for solo piano created with Vicky Chow, flows through delicately changing moods using a mix of modern classical, granular synthesis, and electro-acoustic effects, while her recent covers have reinterpreted indie folk songs into slowed-down meditations to reveal their underlying emotions.
With Birthday Party, she takes this idea to the max. She began writing the EP around the time of her January birthday, when the world is still and cold. At the time, too, she wanted to collaborate with others in a more material way, breaking out of the composer-performer hierarchy. So, she began writing fragmented lyrics—a new endeavor—crafting small phrases she could spin into misty, ambient soundscapes. And though the album is technically Wieland’s solo debut, everything about Vines is collaborative, from the time spent building out tracks in the studio with her friend Mike Tierney to the name Vines, which she came up with spur-of-the-moment after a friend gave her a small vine-shaped stick-and-poke tattoo the night before her first show.
The recordings that appear on Birthday Party were assembled throughout the fall of 2022 at Tierney’s Shiny Things studio in Brooklyn. Wieland and Tierney had a great trust, bouncing ideas off of each other in order to develop the music. The tracks each branch out like a tree from her lyrics that describe the push-and-pull between the moments where you’re supposed to be celebratory, but you don’t feel that way at all. Wieland’s words are stark, the sort of one-sentence thoughts that run through your head in the darkness of night—“I guess I’ll go home” or “I’ll fall apart if I need to, I don’t mind,” for example—growing into a crescendoing chorus as electronics, guitar, piano, and drums swirl around them. In each repetition, she uncovers more meaning, pushing further into the powerful emotions that live inside of each phrase.
Birthday Party finds Wieland at her most vulnerable, a feeling that often scared her before she recorded the music. When composing, there was a wall between herself and her work because she wrote her music for others to interpret; with Vines, her feelings are the work itself. It’s an arrival to a new sound and to a new practice of intimacy and honesty in music. And much like a birthday itself, Birthday Party captures all the emotions that come with change, marking the moment when a new chapter begins.
