alexglower

[alexglower]

Natural Snow Buildings - Daughter of Darkness (2009)

seven-hour demon-summoning ritual

It was hard for me... This is a seven-hour, five or six disc (depending on where you look) album. I may have a longer attention span than when I first started diving into ambient music, but it isn't long enough to get through this whole project in one sitting, even if one review I read said that's the definitive way to experience it. I got through two discs in half-hour- to hour-long bursts, before bed and at the gym. Then I dropped it. I am very ashamed and hope you can forgive me...

Why wasn't I a fan? There's quite of a bit of distortion on these acoustic drones, but it sounds stuck at a crossroads between "light warmth" and "intense fuzz," to the point where it evokes neither. The textures here don't do anything for me except make me feel like I should be intimidated or scared or something, without actually generating those feelings.

The only discomfort I felt came from the lack of direction in these songs. The other Natural Snow Buildings album I heard, The Winter Ray, had stylistic shake-ups a few times per hour. Daughter of Darkness takes a lot longer to reach an intermission, and it's not telegraphed in the slightest, so listening to these tracks felt like staring down an endless barrage of mild annoyance.

Now the asides begin!

In writing this, I briefly perused some of these tracks again and came to the conclusion that they're actually not so bad. I couldn't write as much about why they're good because I don't have it in me to listen again, but that first-listen vs. second-listen dynamic is pretty interesting.

For me, I use a first listen to wrap my head around what it is I'm even listening to. For structured genres like pop, I also use it to get a grasp on hooks and song structures. The second listen is where I willingly immerse myself in a record. Knowing where it's taking me is part of the fun. There's a difference between listening to a very slow, very long record when you know how it's changing and where it's going (like Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort) and listening to a very slow, very long record that leaves you fruitlessly guessing every second. It's about trust. Can I trust this album to hum along in the background? Do I need to pay active attention? What should I be doing?

I realize this is a pretty restrictive way of looking at art, one that totally shuts out many live improvisational performances, and also one that probably reveals me to be a fundamentally anxious person. If there's any lesson to be learned here, it's probably that I should open myself up to surprises or something...

As luck would have it, this album has at least one surprise! Among the songs I listened to, there's one that cools everything down substantially ("Body Double") before slowly easing the listener back in to the fray. And it was euphoric! After however long of slightly painful music that I did not enjoy at all, a reprieve was more than welcome. Not just any reprieve, either, but a "legitimate" one. Ambient music exists (or at least endeavors to exist) beyond the listener's experience of it. It often tries to evoke the physical or spectral. If I gave myself a break from the music by simply taking my headphones off (as I did many times because I listened in many sittings), the break would not be "real." The music would still rage on outside of my perception. Only when the music itself quiets down can I get actual relief.

The final thing I've been chewing on is that I wouldn't have liked the calm bit of the album nearly as much if I didn't dislike the other parts. I firmly believe that art can conjure any emotion and still be worthy of existing, even if those emotions are dull or painful. Comedies are fun to watch, but sad dramas can be good too, blah blah blah. I just never before considered that "dislike" could be one such valid emotion. I guess if it's intended (I believe I read an article where the Natural Snow Buildings peeps said they didn't mind their music being overly long or hard to listen to), then it's not an inherent failing. Maybe this album is fine-tuned to intentionally avoid the "easy routes" of soft ambiance or intense catharsis? Maybe the grating middle ground vibe is on purpose?

As an occasional music and film reviewer, I'm pretty used to reading my dislike of something as a negative reflection of its worth, but this whole thing has me reconsidering what "worth" even means. Why note tonal inconsistencies and pacing issues in a movie if none of that means anything, if it's valid art regardless, if my petty dislike is actually a rich experience in this complex tapestry we call life? I guess "like" and "dislike" are arbitrary qualifiers we pair with certain emotions, and just because I added "painful catharsis" to my Like List doesn't mean I fully escaped the false dichotomy of binary rating...

All this circles back to the idea that basically nothing has any inherent meaning, which is true, but also makes life no fun. So I'm going to go back to pretending that there's meaning to reviews for at least a little while longer.

Listen to this album if you want to experience something interesting in the short time you have before you die!

[alexglower]

James Ferraro - Last American Hero / Adrenaline's End (2008)

late-night broadcast, bikers, big deserts

In concept, this album represents the mid-2000s upper middle class and the hellish purgatory in which they roamed. The use of bluesy guitars—none of which are sampled, apparently!—gives Last American Hero a Wild West twang, like tumbleweeds are about to start rolling down the aisles of Ikea. I think the "point" is to contrast the machismo of old Americana with the reality of easy, constant, on-demand consumerism. You can't be a cowboy in a gated community.

A heavy dose of tape degradation (saturation, compression, the usuals) makes everything extra "nostalgic." It's a trick that could come off cheap but for some reason doesn't, and I have a hard time understanding why. Maybe it's because James Ferraro was doing nostalgic reflections on his then-present moment, rather than editorializing something from decades previous. Maybe it's because the album feels disposable, like something you'd pluck from the bargain bin, itself contributing to the vast churning sea of American consumption. It all feels very intentional, but not demanding.

Consumerism is really the name of the game here. It's probably true that in 24 hours the same amount of people eat at McDonalds as attend church. Ferraro asks, "What if we treated the Big Mac like we do Jesus Christ?" He commits to the bit so he can show us our own absurd fealty to corporations/products/things.

That theme isn't as prominent on this specific album as it is on other Ferraro releases, but it's still there if you listen. The raspy audio quality and occasional sonic "jump-cuts" bring to mind staticy late-night television. Think of the junk that would get thrown in the post-midnight slots, stuff that didn't need to be interesting because there were practically no viewers—media waste, basically. Or think of driving down long stretches of highway with a radio playing endless pop songs and advertisements, struggling to maintain a signal from one gas station to the next. Last American Hero's repetition of motifs without catharsis represents this junk, represents the stuff we get inundated with during our every waking moments, all the products and monocultural slogans and whatnot on all the billboards on all the highways etc etc etc.

I'm starting to feel a bit crazy typing this all out, so it's about time I wrap up! Give this album a listen if you're nostalgic for the real 2000s...

[alexglower]

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

limited palette of vocals and guitar, sometimes there are lyrics, hazy but textured, kind of reminds me of pine needles

Grouper is in some way "singer-songwriter music," in that Liz Harris is a singer, a songwriter and the one person making up Grouper, but her writing and singing is merely the background for her greater style. Like a lot of ambient music, the main artistry happens in editing her recordings. Harris typically stacks many takes together and adds a good helping of reverb until the material underneath all that obscuring might as well be anyone saying anything. Dragging a Dead Deer was apparently her most intelligible album at the time of its release–and by a wide margin, too!–yet I challenge you to create a lyrics sheet for it with no "[?]"s. Reading the Genius lyrics for some of these songs feels like I'm watching people interpret "backronyms" (those supposed hidden messages in reversed pop songs).

The effect is that the album feels like something heard between waking and sleeping, just melodically focused enough to turn on that "I'm listening to a song someone wrote" part of your brain, but vague enough that you won't need to think too hard. But it's not some calm, uncomplicated thing. I read one piece that mentioned impressionism and the pain that comes with not recognizing a representation of something. Every effort to obscure the music makes it a little more painful, a little more nostalgic (hopefully I don't need to bring up that Mad Men quote about nostalgia and pain). This album could easily lull you to sleep, but it would be quite the turbulent slumber.

What interested me most when researching this album was Harris's approach to making music. The cloaking of her voice behind reverb—and her identity behind a stage name—is all intentional; she comes across very ego-averse in interviews. She even talks about songs like they're not entirely her own creations, but rather sounds she just so happens to be the one organizing. She makes it clear that her music is not a diary of her present circumstances, and she frequently populates albums with songs recorded in different decades of her career. Simile warning: it's like each track she makes is an orphan she's temporarily fostering until she can find it a good home. And it's not a exactly a fun process–she's compared releasing music to blood-letting, releasing ghosts, and sinking something heavy into the deep. I imagine every bad external force that's applied to her gets funneled through her musician brain and slowly, painfully excised every few years.

I think in another millennium, Liz Harris would be considered some sort of psychic, receiving unwelcome visions and stuff of that nature. But since we live in 2024 and I don't believe in any of that, I see it differently. Obviously, she's actively writing these songs, and not receiving them via magic. She talks about photographs, films and ideas that inspire her, so there's at least part of her that's a traditional songwriter. But I think creativity is instinctual to her, maybe even compulsive, and that's the thorny aspect.

I feel the same way a lot of the time. I don't want to harp on this for too long because at the end of the day it's not about me, but death is on my mind a lot. Like always. There's no philosophy I can intellectually support that says making music will prolong my life via legacy, but it's certainly the feeling I have when I write/produce. It's pointless and sisyphean, but I do it anyway. Much like dragging a dead deer up a hill! I brought it full circle in the end.

Anyway, listen to this album if you like shoegaze and stuff of that sort. It's not shoegaze, but it has that same feeling!

[alexglower]

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