In Lungs in the third self-released album from Memphis based soporific ambient folk band Liquid Skulls. Woven from skeins of deeply haunting material, this record manages to be even more intricate and delicate than March's gossamer Dead In Yr Eyes. Extending my interpretations of the sounds I described in my post on that previous release, their quicksilver sound is hard to define, occupying a blurred landscape constructed in some twilight netherworld beween the ambiance of Grouper's deer dragging and Appalachian wyrd folk song structures - less campfire, more swampfire - a boggy and murky veil obscuring a comforting soul-warming centre.
All free downloads are now sold out but you can still pick this up for just $5 from their Bandcamp.
Sean Conrad is an exploratory sort of person. He is physically well travelled, having moved round the US and now residing in New Zealand, though his camp there is an equally nomadic one. His previous release as Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Glacial Ways found him take tentative steps towards the water's edge of a new sound - the element itself; Water. With titles that involve the words River, Mist, Clouds and Snow the main influence for Nature Eternal Striving is explicitly liquid and the album immediately starts with the gentle sway and rocking that echoes the waves and tides and continues to expound on the theme throughout. This new record comes with one of Sean's more insightful introductions which explains his disinterest in water and the fact he hasn't even been swimming for five years, then explains his realisation of it's importance to him and a new found connection to it. The music of Gkfoes has always been elementally obsessed, starting off with forest forays and campfire rounds ripened in the pine scented backwoods of his home state of California, albums strewn with birdsong and wind rustling leaves, tracks embellished with the sounds of the ambient nature around him. Now living in one of the wettest regions on Earth he has begun producing music that is in thrall to the rhythms and textures that make up seventy percent of the world's surface and the insides of our bodies.
On Nature Eternal Striving Sean has filled his sound out just that little bit much more and created his most cohesive and wholly consuming record to date. What he achieves is one of those masterly atmospheres that is not so easy to describe, yet so easy to sink into and be transported along with. Its apparent simplicity belies it's complex psychological effect and musical construction; a harmonising of alertness and deep slow breathing trance that will almost flat line your heart-rate with tracks like the 17 minute River Friends and closing Temple Of Snow. This is drone music with a lot of movement. There's a shimmering post-rock ambience to the way his use of repetition is pushed to subliminally affecting, physically arresting purposes, teasing out endlessly looping refrains of majestic beauty. This is new age trance music in the vein of White Rainbow's Prism Of Eternal Now without the ironic knowingness of what it's attempting, nor any of the crudity of someone like Dolphins Into The Future (though Ka Ala Ke Kua does convincingly refutes that).
In a harsh critical sense this could be viewed as practical, utility, flotation tank music, but that view would overlook the depth and sheer talent of the musicianship that enhance the album through the intangible elements of quiet euphoria that have always been there in his work. On ...Striving Sean has made these elements more pronounced whilst simultaneously immersing them into the body of the tracks with a more finessed subtlety that makes them much more consciously apparent, creating a coherent, transcendent, yet still elusive album that is always ahead of the listener, leading the mind into over-abundant landscapes of sonic fauna and flora.
Nature Eternal Striving is released on 12th August by Inner Islands and is available to order now. Comes on multicoloured 12" vinyl in a double gatefold sleeve, with digital download.
Here's the final track from the album; The Temple In Snow:
Polyverse / Mother Network Oceanic Dynamics EP DOWNLOAD
Split release from two electronic artiststhat seem to be developing significant shapes for themselves out of the nebulous but infinitely malleable soundworlds that drone has to the capacity to yield.Three pieces each, of relatively/very short running times.
The Polyversetracks offer up alternate universes in themselves; Younger Hours, Older Voices is beguiling ambience, all translucent irridescence layered upon each other, one side of the shell. Inside it is a flickering netherworld of beats suspended in the slimy flesh of the creature within. Very tasty, two quick slurps and they're in your system. Seductive and addictive.
The Mother Network tracks that add the shell, something hard and crusty. I wrote about his first savage Nintendocore release at the start of April (here), but this is something far more elegant and refined, but not as sub-zero chilled as he is capable of taking things. Dox Organica has a keening tone that offsets anything calming within it, the gentle expansion and contraction of it's undulating beat sequence regulating your senses to trance-inducing ends were it not for the recalcitrant jarring he deploys near the end. There's a further remnant of the 8-bit projects this artists also works on in Spirocysts; hi-fi Zelda explorations and fantasy questing soundtrack, it's optimistically searching melody a paen to hours of absorption with controller in hand.
Drone Day continues with this teaser/lead track for Belong's new album Common Life, out on Kranky on 2nd March. What an incredible change of sound this is from their previous snow-drift drone tones, combining ambient with textural and moulding a rock shape out of it - with vocals. Hazy, warped, distant, echoic, dreamy, hazy, warped, distant, echoic, dreamy, hazy, warped, distant, echoic, loops of gentle human frailty buried right in there amongst the mechanical and environmental chaos.
