I can recite only one love poem from memory. It’s four lines long and has no title, which is probably why I can remember it. But every so often, like the very best poetry, and the very best writing, it will come into my mind unprompted, spilling forth from the recesses of my brain: “That Love is all there is / Is all we know of Love / It is enough, the freight should be / Proportioned to the groove.” As Dickinson poems go, this one is simple, but it cuts to the quick. Each line has its own weight. The second two are particularly elusive. It strikes me that what they do isn’t so much create an image, but an image of an image—the distant sensation of something that clicks together, of two things well aligned. I thought of this poem almost constantly while listening to Love Aggregates, Asher White’s latest record. I suppose because it made me think of love and the way it can multiply, as the title suggests. But more often it was those second two lines that occurred to me. That sensation of a sensation, the sound of a sound. The way music, like love, is itself a collection of aggregates, a whole perfectly proportioned to the sum of its parts. White strikes me as something of a renaissance woman—not in the sense that she is a polymath (though she is), but in the sense that there is an indefatigable curiosity in her, a sort of magpie-ish tendency that has consistently underpinned her creative practice (in the notes for Asher White Misses The Good Old Days, for instance, White describes the album as the product of her “slowly & unsurely collecting fragments of lyrics, melodies, arrangements and cool sounds for the past few years.”). On Love Aggregates, it is not just sound that is collected but feeling, succinctly expressed in lyrics that are unabashedly beautiful (“Tonight there’s a Dreamworks moon / All the parking lot spaces all blossom like tulips”), unabashedly obscure (“Hand-eye for the truth but / What’s done in bluff just sharpens the blade), or both (“and I’ll always want to live with happy bums / with shrapnel in the streets and bottles in the sun”). All these emotions, naturally, are aggregates of one big feeling: love. But sound is collected, too. Written in the aftermath of a long-term relationship, and the wake of her increasing popularity with Home Constellation Study and last year’s 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, Love Aggregates sees White retaining that renaissance woman sensibility—an instinct to venture outward, to seek out new and interesting sounds—while pairing it with a real warmth and interest in melody. The opening of the record has an audible gentleness to it, as though the sound is being picked out with the same deliberateness one might use to gather a particularly lovely bouquet. “Reverie for work” has the soft, dream-like quality that its title suggests, gliding through an organ-like hum of synthesizers and scratches of static to settle on White’s voice, light and lilting over a waltz rhythm to look back on a day just finished: “There goes a rolling sunrise, there goes a dull afternoon.” Much of Love Aggregates, like White’s previous work, is a solo project (White’s credits include instruments ranging from banjo to feedback to toy piano). I hesitate to say that the introduction of collaborators on the record signifies a widening of scope—White’s has always been dizzyingly, devastatingly wide—but it does add tone and color to an already varied and accomplished piece of work. The efforts of Jacob Davidson (trumpet) and Asa Turok (trombone) add a brassy kick to “My day at the casino”: already an oxymoronically upbeat break-up song, subtle in its bitterness, it renders resignation to the end of a relationship with surprising brightness. “Only you’d err like that again,” White sings. Then, after a tight, groovy instrumental of trumpet and trombone playing in harmony, before being joined by beautifully layered, almost frenetic strings, comes the inevitable conclusion: “By revelation’s woe I know I would not want you always.” The strings make another excellent outing on “Jerryboy,” White’s tongue-in-cheek imagining of the birth of Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia (all his mother wanted, White suggests, is for her son “to be chiller than me.”). With violins that soar then settle somewhere deep in a bedrock of instruments, the track blooms. The bridge brings something new to life just as Garcia’s “sick maiden mother” does, intensifying and complicating as the sound multiplies. The combination of strings and electric guitar gives the song a folk varnish, as though we were gathering around to hear an old and well-known story being told, one that ends, fable-like, with an imperative: “So give a sly wink at the festival gates / Though know in your heart no one’s let in this late.” In some respects it is possible to see Love Aggregates as White’s (re-)introduction to the world: she is hypothetically “breaking through,” receiving more attention than before despite having more than a dozen records under her name. But this might be a misnomer—an introduction necessarily comes with some self-consciousness, perhaps even an awkwardness, and Love Aggregates, to my ear, has none (unless it serves a musical purpose). White has no time for self-consciousness. She is too busy assimilating every sound she can think of: a well-rounded, elegant collection of songs that affect you deeply and give you the distinct impression that their author has much more to say. She is unafraid to dive headfirst into any number of genres or influences, from funk to electronica to folk. Love Aggregates is precisely and intelligently calibrated, and the jubilance with which White approaches her subject matter, even in moments of loss or sadness, obscures just how well-crafted it is. Take “White castles sad,” for instance. At first, it might sound like a lovely, if simple, acoustic ballad. But under scrutiny, it begins to shine: White’s soft, tuneful higher register aligning with sparsely finger-picked guitar. By the time you’ve contemplated it thoroughly enough, you’re already on the next track, and in a new sonic universe. By “Atoll,” the album’s most distinct pain point, you know better than to take White at face value, and the sounds that greet you are rich and diverse: keyboard arpeggios looping densely around themselves, strings squeaking and shivering towards the track’s close. Then, a mournfully echoing vocal line: “Oh, and I was yours for a little while.” Perhaps Love Aggregates’s greatest and most unsettling achievement is its disinterest in clear points of start or end, the way White can often build momentum and then tug it out from underneath a song without hesitating. This takes time to get used to, but once you do, it becomes one of the record’s brightest strengths. A drum fill unexpectedly takes center stage on “Memory patient (Motor Cycle Angel)” to see out the song. The strings of “Atoll” overlap with squawking, teeth-hurting feedback noises to remove the song from the realm of violin-inflected ballad and into something uglier and more complex. The frenetic, overpowered rhythm guitars on “Stage Diva” pair with a catchy hook––then, just as you think you’ve learned the chorus in time for a barn-storming reprise, the instruments all disappear as White observes two people walking home at the end of the evening. As she sings gently over an almost honky-tonk upright piano, that distant fitting together returns; that freight in the groove, the sensation of a sensation. It is the same feeling that you get from being outside at a party, listening to music playing from another room, your friends screaming  along to the lyrics of your favorite song forming the backdrop of a conversation that shimmers with possibility (“do you total up as you walk home / the mysteries of her gaze?”), with love–the album’s only unifying theme, which returns over and over without fail. Love that aggregates, and is the aggregate of other, smaller loves. It is the topic of everything we do and make, even when we don’t want it to be—it is all there is. Asher White knows how to meet this reality, making an album that is strange and smart and always pleasurable to listen to. It’s enough: the freight should be proportioned to the groove. [Joyful Noise] Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.