Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
It’s been a long time since Scott Morgan has released an album with so menacing an edge. Lake Fire was inspired by the wildfires that recently and frequently consume the landscape of the west coast of the North American continent. Morgan took a road trip up into the mountains of his home Vancouver, and looked out on the clouds of smoke and ash that blearily obscured the natural world he loves so much. He described the experience as, “celebrating life while the world burns.”
Taking these snapshots back into the studio we arrive at a familiar place, but there’s a smear on the lens, and an obfuscation distorting everything as it pans. As it turns out, dub-style loops are the perfect raw material for the terror of a wildfire encroaching on the carefully managed illusion of everyday life. Fleeing home, the world in retreat outside the car window, trees passing uniformly, one the same as the next. Each flickering flame is every flame, all fire is the eternal fire. It bursts into our lives, summoned sparking from the aether and running insatiable through the tinder we’ve built our lives around. It’s easy to hear the motion of these scenes, and to feel the strain on the senses. The steady pulse of tires on the road casting highway-hypnosis, and the eyes heavy and raw with cinder.
The endlessly ominous atmosphere that Morgan creates hasn’t had such a prevalent place in his work since 2016’s Monument Builders. Though, much more subtle here, it manages to evoke the same uneasiness. It suggests a horizon in perpetual approach, unclear and inescapable. However, true to his word, there is plenty of beauty to breathe in despite the smoke that comes with it.
Time Indefinite by William Tyler (Psychic Hotline)
The pandemic still casts a long shadow, and while much of the world seems to have moved beyond it, musicians still have albums trickling out to remind us of those strange times. Made during a brief return home to Nashville from Los Angeles, 2020 turned it into a permanent layover. This is the headspace that William Tyler returns us to on Time Indefinite. Self-described as a “mental illness record” where the listener is pulled into the tumult of “music about losing your mind, but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” The record does swing wildly in both directions, leaning into the manic worry and the fleeting moments of peace stolen from relentless despair. The perseverance of spirit, miles from all you love, but held in the trembling arms of an uncertain humanity. Even the damned have the community of their suffering.
Though Tyler is known as a guitar player, Time Indefinite shows off his ability to smudge the instrument’s familiar sound by drawing it out of its comfort zone and into unfamiliar spaces. Utilizing tape loops, cell phone voice memos, and field recordings, the various artifacts implicit in these recording mediums add fresh tints and hues from one song to another. What may have started as a sketch of a song, finds itself growing—not through melody or chord progression, but through the negative spaces. Tape hiss swells into distortion. A loop begins to crackle and warble around the edges. Wind whistling through a crack in the door blows bits of radio static through the room, like a shaft of light holding a dance for bits of dust.
It’s easy to hear the person alone in his room with a tape recorder. Much like John Fahey’s most ecstatic explorations, there are moments where a simple idea turns into a rumination that scrapes along the walls and skitters across the ceiling. The songs sometimes sound haunted with the ghosts of other songs. Much like The Caretaker, the hints of a musical phrase appear from a wall of crackles and pops and recedes like the apparition it is. There are also crystal clear moments of quintessential Americana. That total consoling sadness that can only come from a lone guitar spinning in a web of thoughts, walking an empty road into the blinding orange of a sunset.
Tuning the Wind by Grand River (Umor Rex)
Sometimes it’s easy to balk at the notion of an album built around a concept, or a rigid set of rules. The balking is frequently made easy because, despite complying with these restrictions, the music fails to capture any magic during the act of creation. It may as well be a set of equations followed to completion, the musical equivalent of running an errand. That is most definitely not the case here. Aimée Portioli’s statement of intention is essentially the title of the record: recordings of the wind are tuned to a desired pitch, or instruments are tuned to the pitch of the wind. That’s it. And the results are gorgeous.
Let’s think about this idea more concretely. The wind itself is silent, but when it encounters an object the interaction creates a sound. Like a reed in a wind instrument or the whistle through a cracked window. Now, take these two paltry examples and imagine all the other instances in which the wind is felt, ignored, and not otherwise observed. That is the other bit of magic this record has up its sleeve. In making properly beautiful music with these recordings, it serves as an invitation to connect more with the frequently ignored aspects of the day to day. Lost beneath the arm-waving mind, shooing away outer intrusion upon our inner lamentation. Just let it in already.
Another notable method is the use of dynamics inherent in the wind to rise from a whisper to a gale, forcing the listener’s attention to bend under the sway of the passing weather. While the music itself is heavily synthesized, the source material imparts an organic sense of rhythm. This is true both of individual sections of the piece, and the composition as a whole. A recurring melody will waft this way and that for several minutes until a new formation sends the notes tumbling away. A heavy rumble pounds the capsule of the microphone, and fades to a near silence where there is nothing save the crisp rustle of leaves.
It’s no surprise that this piece was originally done as an installation, and it makes even more sense that it was presented in quadraphonic sound. It’s a shame there isn’t a way to listen to music like this at home. For as good as the stereo mix is, adding two more speakers would only enhance the sense of being in the middle of this ever-mutating environment.
Honorable Mentions
Totality by Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas (Drag City)
Following 2015’s Autoimaginary, these two staples of the Chicago music scene are back together for their second collaborative album. Independently, both groups excel at crafting kaleidoscopic sound worlds, where repetition lays the brickwork of larger forms. Together, they lean further into this hyper-focused means of composition. The result is a kind of ambient-psychedelic-drone jazz. In the spirit of ambient music, distracted listening yields a plush sonic carpet. The tightly controlled undulations of tone and dynamics hammer in the sense of endless return. While the minute shifting of dense patterns provides cover for the ponderous needlework of each musician’s voice.
Natural Information Society quite frequently use (their harmonium player) Lisa Alvarado’s hanging paintings as album covers and backdrops for their live shows. It’s hard not to draw a connection between the music and the aesthetic of the visual art. There are meticulous forms of contrasting colors standing shoulder to shoulder, drawing the eye in one direction and the head in the other. As with the cover of Totality, a larger pattern properly scrutinized reveals all the individual threads braided, knotted, and stitched into the flesh of the thing in toto. The more one looks, and the more one listens, it is the subtlest details that lend their shine in illumination of the greater whole.
Under Tangled Silence by DjRUM (Houndstooth)
A perfect combination of crystal-clear acoustic instruments and meticulous drum machine programming, DjRUM blurs the lines between the organic and the synthetic. Not that there aren’t big warbling bass notes, and frequency modulation that corkscrews into the stratosphere. It’s how the instrumentation is folded together. A kick drum hammering with increasing regularity, tucked beneath a piano running arpeggios up the keyboard, the compositional purpose of one is reflected in the other, driving the music towards the edge before a drop.
The rhythmic elements of the album are truly fantastic. I was reminded of Beatrice Dillion’s Workaround, where all things percussion melt together under the heat of syncopation. There are enough purposeful rests between sections of dizzying percussion that it’s easy to see these moments as the artist letting you up for air. It’s just enough space to marvel at what has passed, before plunging you back under through the same pattern again. The only difference is now you know when to breathe. It’s a marvel in that the music is as exploratory as it is instructional. It plays by its own rules, but it teaches you how to play along.
To Sit Quietly While Everything is Moving Fast by Love Over Entropy (Something Happening Somewhere)
I usually try to keep the music mentioned in each column within a month’s time of its writing, but in this case I missed something quite remarkable from back in February.
Another instance of music that has its creative roots in the virus times of 2020, and the constriction of working with one piece of gear: the Yamaha DX11 synthesizer. The songs themselves tend toward the minimal, but the simple movements are rich in timbre and the creation of an introspective space. Much like the album title and the date of conception suggest, the music has a sense of stasis at its core. While some of the tracks, like “Echolon,” have a darker edge to them, they never feel resigned to the hopelessness that ran wild with the Covid pandemic. Maybe things were different in the Netherlands.
While there aren’t any drum tracks on the record, there is an underlying pulse to most of the songs that retain the feel of those lost and drifting days, the clockwork hum of the whittling mind. It seems that the album title and the artist’s moniker are perfectly suited not only to when this record was created, but, from where I’m sitting, it fits our current times quite well also. Something more valuable than the apathy mislabeled as stoicism, taking stock of reality and, with a clear head, reaching through the storm of chaos with generosity.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Trill Scan by T. Gowdy (Constellation Records)
Taba by Satomimagae (RVNG Intl.)
Reach by Kneebody (Ground Up Music)
Iris Silver Mist by Jenny Hval (4AD)
Idealism III by Kita kouhei (neuf)
On a Painted Ocean by Walt McClements (Western Vinyl)
Uhlman Johnson Wilkes by Gregory Uhlman, Josh Johnson, & Sam Wilkes (International Anthem)
Rotations by The Album Leaf (Nettwerk)