Last week, Eric Atienza asked: “What does your winter comfort music sound like?”

I have a memory of being three, maybe four years old, and visiting my estranged uncle, or maybe friends of my parents, in Middle-of-Nowhere Ontario. It was the dead of winter, and snow was on the ground. Some sort of party was going on in the house, and the windows glowed hues of amber and rust like a Hallmark keepsake ornament.

My mum took me outside: the air was so crisp and cold that every particle of breath crystallized to join its fellow dust on the ground. The moon hung fuller and rounder than I’d ever seen before, or since. We went to a playground that was surrounded by a perimeter of soldierly trees.

I have no idea whether this memory was real, or merely a vivid dream, but this is one of the visions that endear to me the long, dark season, the caress of a brisk wind against bare limbs, the noisy party bearing out over the hungry, silent snow. To me, winter is best described through ponderous movement and song, the flattening of histories through tradition, happy silence, and happy stillness. Here are the sounds that help me relish the cold.

The USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir, “Troparion: Christ is Risen from the Dead” from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers. While I was raised outside the church without so much as a healthy prejudice for God, my parents were both devout Catholics in their youth and so, in my secular house, we mark the passing of the year with sacred music. Neither was Rachmaninoff attending services when he wrote his All-Night Vigil, which heralds the Resurrection and new life. This troparion celebrates the most joyful moment in the human soul: dawning; revelation; the promise of something that is at once new and also intimately known, and long hungered-for. It is, like the springtime, something to look forward to.

Songs Ohia, “7th Street Wonderland”, Unreleased. This song was one of my first chance downloads in the halcyon days of Napster. The guitar is so simple and deliberate, the crunching of wet snow under heavy boots on a late winter walk. The lyrics speak for themselves.

Buell Kazee, “Lady Gay” from the 1978 re-release of his recordings. In the 1920s, the baptist minister recorded a number of tunes from his extensive repertoire of ballads. This one, which also appears on the exhilarating compilation, Where Will You Be Christmas Day?, tells the story of a mountain mother who sends her three children away to grammar school. On a clear Christmas night, six months after their departure, she sees her babes running over the hills. She sets a table with food for them, but they will not eat. They are ghosts, their bodies dead and buried, and they have come to say their last goodbyes to their mother before their souls return to God.

Björk, “Ancestors” from Medúlla. Inuit history and culture are passed down aurally. Like so many Inuit traditions, the origin of katajjaq, the Nunavik name for Inuit throat singing, is lost somewhere on old tundra, but the performance lives on through Inuk bodies. Katajjaq is a game, a social dance, where two women “sing” at each other until one laughs or runs out of breath. Björk collaborates with Inuk singer Tagaq on “Ancestors” to create a billowing wordless hymn of sighs and moans. At the end of it, I’m the one who’s left breathless.

Winter is a hard time for me. In Ohio, you never see the sun, and you rarely get the satisfaction of a blanket of white to reflect what little light filters down through those inviolable clouds. I hope these tracks leave you feeling as warm-spirited as they leave me, and help reconcile you to the months of grey ahead.

© Ryan Stolte-Sawa for Listen In.

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