It’s grey outside here, the sky ashen and featureless, the horizon sucked in close and a cold breeze on the air; Autumn is well on its way and you’d think by how impenetrable the clouds look we’ll never see blue sky again. I just splashed a little water on my face: a slight dampness still clings to the skin but it made me feel a bit more lively. I still have a mysterious pain in my lower back that’s been there for a couple of days, but it’s not so bothersome right now. Here. All of that is where I am and more. By the time you read this, it’ll be where I was, but the moment lives on, a little sliver of time and space locked away, permanised.
In each of the 7 pieces we’re presented with the notion of capturing a moment, finding the album torn somewhere between nostalgia and bitterness towards the passage of time. The need to record balances alongside the desire to remember, and the fear of forgetting.
Calm, slow, meditative structures unwind in “Part VI”, drone exhalations moving with sedentary tenderness through a dreamstate, sweet radiative tones slicing gently through the mist. It feels content here, secure in itself, immersed in the here-ness for the shining moment it’s allowed. Elongate structures form the heart of hazy “Part II” as well. A two-tone track, it hums with a consistent energy: one, a steady-state drone line that works ceaselessly towards the future; and the other a swirling, convecting undercurrent that cycles inexorably up from the depths to keep the placid quiescence of the surface from stagnating, the need for change, like magma circulating up out of the mantle to push plates along.
This turnover is feared though, the worry of the moment slipping through our fingers and out of memory. “Part IV” feels this menace deeply in its parallel streams of drone integration, time and distance slipping slowly together as tributaries into an erosive force. It’s a merger that carries an apathetic energy that crackles at the seam with buzzing, fractious noise: busy neurons firing to chase permanence; keyboard keys chittering to keep up.
The light wafting oscillations of the shimmering intro piece, in its opulent Basinksi reminiscence, loop over themselves as they work to commit to tape. It’s all fresh still, all new and hopeful, proximal. As is always the case though, resignation and decay is inevitable. The endless, entropic progression of the Universe ushers us gently onwards. The closer feels that force deeply: it has drifted further, its own crystalline loops smeared out and barely moving now as it unwinds in twilit sadness. Everything is being lost, and will all be lost, but there will have always been a “here”.
(hearfeel.co.uk)
