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.
Sidings by Craven Faults (The Leaf Label)
The album description for Sidings bounces between references to recording studios as we travel along a journey through post-war industry, and the methodical labor and unrelenting hardships endured by the working class. Nameless souls, absorbed by endless tasks and dissolving anonymously into the steel and concrete fruits of their labor where their silent ghosts are frozen, lost, inside brutalist utilitarian forms. Only the clockwork rhythm of their toil lives on, calling from within these shapes they leave behind. The swing of a hammer, buckets filled and emptied, machinery plodding circuitously, raising structure from the dirt, gradatim the mud swallowing the lives traded for capital and survived solely by industry.
So listening to Sidings is something like that. The heft of each song approaches from a distance, through steady accumulation. A scant few ingredients go a long way, bolstered by the miracle of repetition. It’s just as easy to get lost tracing the linework toward the cyclonic point of convergence as it is to marvel at the vast form of the ever-rising monolith.
While all the songs on here take the same general shape, they are most effectively demonstrated by the longest on the album, “Ganger,” “Stoneyman,” and “Far Closes.” These are the most effective because in taking longer, they ask for more patience from the listener while they build toward the end. At the helm of a modular synthesizer, it’s often closer to dancing than to playing an instrument. With a finite number of fingers and hands, patch cables quite often do the heavy lifting. This method can frequently result in music that plays itself, effectively removing the human from the equation. That doesn’t appear to be the case here. The music conveys a human touch—active and operating within the limits of the body, working within the machine. Restraint allows the music to keep its focus, and while patch cables and the voltage coursing through them are theoretically endless, there is a maximum to what two arms and ten fingers can accomplish.
Here lies the balance that Craven Faults finds in their explorations both musical and philosophical. Mirroring the album’s travelogue as laid out in the liner notes, hemmed into the music, and active in the artist’s method of creation, the human organism exercised through its recursive practices serving fleeting and intangible ends. The body falters and fails when the tools do not. Time traded labor finds dust blown monuments static through the years long after the fingerprints of a life have faded.
Euphoria Bound by Shackleton (AD93)
Euphoria Bound manages to sound like an alien amalgam of (extra-)terrestrial rituals mated into one grand gesture of catharsis. There’s a cornucopia of percussion featured across the record—probably every drum ever invented, and this polyrhythmic fury seems to be the backbone of the conjuring of altered spaces, melodies wrapping back on themselves, sparks and flame flickering outward from the maelstrom. As the drums hammer on, the repetition teases out the happening behind the songs. So often—for example on “The Past Awakening,” it sounds like there is a melody attempting to repeat itself, be heard fully just once, but every time it begins to speak the tape speeds up/slows down, or it’s crushed to death by a distortion pedal. It feels like expressing the same thing more than once or even once is impossible.
In its final form, I would describe it as tastefully maximalist. There is plenty of room to hear each of the instruments in the mix, but at the same time, once the song ends it feels like you can’t remember where you’ve been. The rhythms so alluring and enchanting that the parts you might want to hum along to have all fallen away between this listen and the last. It feels like a magic trick, where it’s easy to point toward the motions that alternately conjure and conceal, but there is nothing to say about where your card went or how a coin has been pulled from behind your ear.
The inscrutable nature of the songs is the invitation for a return visit. For each audible occurrence that your brain can wrap around, give a name to, there are ten more that fly by while your attention is misdirected. Euphoria Bound quite successfully creates a drug-like experience for the listener. The substance ingested may be the same, but somehow there are an infinite number of doors that open as sounds collide and your brain reels as the all-of-it washes over you.
Honorable Mentions
Full Serpent – EP by Dialect (RVNG Intl.)
Right out of the gate, Full Serpent pushes Dialect’s usual tricks a little more, using an encyclopedia of sampled material to create an ADHD soundscape of musical collage. The opening tracks of “Ev’ry Portal Past” and “Earth Angels of the Bone Age” fly by in such a kaleidoscopic twirl that it feels much like wrestling with a Times Square smashing through the front of your face. The craftsmanship is immediately obvious, even if the focal points of the songs are not.
The contrast between the first and the latter half of the record couldn’t be more dramatic. Much more gentle in its execution, a milder pace with more room to breathe and look around, the title track arrives with an introspective air which feels so subdued compared to the sugar rush crunch of the opening tracks. It is only an EP, but the record feels uneven in this way, lacking a through point that would serve to bridge these two extremes. Who knows? These may just be the leftovers of something larger in the works, where we could expect to see the usual balance and cohesion we’ve come to expect from Dialect.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
HUMAN ERROR CLUB AT KENNY’S HOUSE by HUMAN ERROR CLUB & Kenny Segal (Backwoodz Studios)
Neverland by Ulver(House of Mythology)
Requiem by Simona Zamboli (Detroit Underground)
Nineteen Seventy Seven by Grupo Um (Far Out Recordings)
Ash by Loscil (Self-Released)