Shortly after Adrianne Lenker’s arrival onstage at Portland’s Revolution Hall, the audience’s anticipatory silence turns giddy, breaking into warm laughter that wafts across the room like a rustling breeze. “Some really good giggles going on,” she says winkingly. “All I did is walk on.” Recorded over three nights and brimming with 43 tracks, Live at Revolution Hall is stitched through with such intimate moments. Surrounding live performances are soundchecks, joyous greetings from attendees, appearances from Lenker’s dog Oso, and sentimental exchanges with friends. In one snippet, Lenker begins plucking “Now Westlin Winds,” a ballad by Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan based on Robert Burns’ “Composed in August,” on her guitar. She declares she can’t sing it, then proceeds to recite each verse in full, raising her voice at one point to compete with a motorcycle’s hapless roar. The result is a vivid archive not just of time but also of space—the ephemera orbiting any formal live performance.

Space has become a growing fixture in Lenker’s music, in both her work as the clear-eyed lodestar of the folk rock band Big Thief and as a solo artist. She recorded 2020’s songs/instrumentals straight to tape in a remote western Massachusetts cabin because it reminded her of “the inside of an acoustic guitar.” A similar process followed for 2024’s Bright Future, where a coterie of collaborators joined her in chasing each song’s unfolding in an atmosphere of immediacy. (Two of them, alt-R&B artist Nick Hakim and violinist Josefin Runsteen, accompany Lenker for the majority of Live at Revolution Hall.) In the celestial body of Lenker’s music, songs are flickering instances rather than any kind of fixed point.

On Live at Revolution Hall, Lenker partnered with her long-time friend and collaborator, Andrew Sarlo, who refracts those three Portland nights through three different recording formats. Operating as a modern-day Alan Lomax, Sarlo used a handheld cassette recorder, a four-channel cassette recorder, and a reel-to-reel tape machine to move listeners around: from soundcheck to live performance, from back of the hall to front, from private moments to public ones. “promise is a pendulum,” off Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, begins at practice, crackling with lo-fi atmosphere as though Lenker were in the 1920s auditioning for Ralph Peer, then suddenly, seamlessly, gives way to the saturated live version—all luminous color. The most beguiling of these transitions occurs on “anything,” which shifts four times, widening the view to encapsulate the audience’s sing-along, then narrowing it to focus Lenker’s voice, and finally landing at what sounds like the back of the room where the song echoes at a hazy distance.

Perfection is not the goal here—presence is. Over “indiana,” from Lenker’s debut solo album Hours Were the Birds, someone in the audience keeps sneezing, leading to the title, “indiana & sneezing.” The track is a short one—just the briefest glimpse of the song—a choice she repeats on the devastating “ruined.” Runsteen’s despondent fiddle brushes up against Lenker’s grieving gossamer voice, but the song cuts out as it approaches the summit. Those edits can be jolting, taking you out of the moment just as Lenker’s songcraft builds to its glorious peak, but Sarlo and Lenker seem more interested in curation—a task that requires trimming some bits out in order to let others breathe.

In an album abundant with selections from the deep well of Lenker’s catalog are five unreleased tracks: “happiness,” “oldest,” “no limit,” “ripples,” and “i do love you.” Lenker introduces “no limit” with an accidental joke: “This is one of my favorite songs, uh, of mine.” Over radiant guitar, she sings about stumbling across big love in small places, her voice stunned with the awe of unexpected discovery. “happiness” shuffles through childhood memories like postcards from the past. There are bounteous images, like looking for Mercury in the night sky or fluorescent snow, alongside charged recollections. “Look at you, big enough,” she sings, her voice arching toward nostalgia, “for happiness.”

Philosopher Walter Benjamin theorized that reproducing art could never capture the special magic of experiencing it in person—that ineffable quality he called “aura.” Yet, Live at Revolution Hall somehow proves otherwise, preserving not just the music, but the unrepeatable intimacy of being there. It glows with other voices. “Here we are for a brief, infinite moment together in this room. Everything has led up to this point,” Lenker tells the crowd over musing piano and fiddle on “not a lot, just forever.” Then, a metallic clang. Someone has dropped something. Lenker exhales a quick laugh at the mundane interruption. “We’re together.”