Whether this relates to the fact that such waves of sound have always been around us, from the environmental hums of more primitive outdoor living to the ceaseless electrical pulsations of our modern indoor spaces, clearly channelling such elemental noise reaches into something potent and profoundly adaptable. Certainly, the artists behind the three new long-form releases and one archival set below draw their strength from such sonic æther funnelling, both consciously and subliminally.
Having somewhat of an unhurried micro-renaissance in their own little corner of the world are veteran dronescapers Windy And Carl (AKA Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren). With Kranky considerately reissuing 2001’s Consciousness LP a couple of years back and planning to exhume 1994’s debut Portal platter again very shortly, as well as the self-released double-CD Heavy Early And The Creation Of Venus appearing in late 2024, the twosome’s activity and profile levels have gradually ticked-up, with some warm overdue recognition of their pioneering and survivalist credentials.
This takes us from whirring glassy prologuing (“Conductor”) and murky subterranean tunnelling (“Coast Starlight”), through ethereal prowling minimalism (“Alvin Loving”) and sci-fi spectralism (“Vellum Paper”), on to abandoned city hauntings (“Apparition On 3rd Street”) and shimmering ambience (“Timelines”), with the agility of four musicians that seem pre-destined to have gelled intuitively as an ensemble.
It’s undeniably intense and challenging stuff from surface listening inspection; but for those prepared to burrow down into the supplied thirty-nine mesmeric minutes, this fits the bill whole-mindedly.
Appearing as the last-ever outing on Woodford Halse offshoot imprint Fenny Compton is Grey Malkin’s Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss, which navigates its own deviating set of drone-mapped directions.
Billed as the first ‘proper’ solo album from Malkin after years of more formalised collaborative conjoining – but peppered with passing contributions predominantly in the vocal department — we are led along a variety of moonlit paths, tuning into mystic rustic reverberations and otherworldly audio fermentations where organic and electronically manipulated layers are mulched meticulously together.
Across the first half of the trail we are shepherded through John Grant-meets-This Mortal Coil starkness (the Burnt Paw-voiced “From The Threshold” and the David Colohan intoned “Grant Me A Silver Ending”); sawing ominous strings set to disembodied spoken words (“Our Limbs Are Made Of Sticks”); and gliding neo-classical cinematics (“Our Limbs Are Made Of Sticks”). Subsequently, we are guided through chirruping yet sinister synth movements (“Burial Song”); foreboding industrial-goes-orchestral soundscapes (“Our Eyes Will Spill With Silver”); a sprawling ten-minute Dead Can Dance via Throbbing Gristle miasma (“Bone Mother”); and incorporeal chamber music played in the bowels of a deserted interstellar vessel (“All The World Is But A Faint Ghost”).Uneasy in its listening, but admirably ambitious in its delivery, this is an arresting way to end the Fenny Compton journey and to start a newer one for Grey Malkin.
Returning with another double-length studio offering are Texas-forged colossus collective Water Damage, whose reputation for psych-drone-rock landscape-bestriding increasingly proceeds them.
Carrying on from last year’s impressive Instruments, as well as interim physical and digital-only live recordings output, the four near-twenty-minute side-long vinyl cuts that make up Repair (delivered courtesy of 12XU in the US and Cardinal Fuzz in the UK) cement their status with the weightiness of Bardo Pond, the entrancing racket-making philosophies of early Eternal Tapestry… and much more.
Whilst exact internal roles and responsibilities are even harder to determine than fellow 12XU super-group labelmates Winged Wheel, with the communalist number of players stretching to over ten and taking in shared or former members of Spray Paint, Swans, Shearwater, Marriage and countless other outfits, along with guests Wendy Eisenberg and Ricardo Dias Gomes this time around, it ultimately matters little when the end results are so cohesively hive-minded. Opener “Reel 45” is perhaps the most uncompromising quarter of the album, with its sustained near-endless circling combination of scything electrical instrumentation and pummelling percussion implements that will hypnotise suitable receptive ears from the start. The ensuing “Reel 38” is a looser-limbed yet more skulking pleasure, driven by its frontline drums, violin lines and chewy bass that envisions a lost White Light / White Heat outtake where only Moe Tucker and John Cale turned up to jam in the studio one day.Thereafter, “Reel 43 Down On The Street” takes on the nominative track from The Stooges’ Funhouse by reducing things to a core palpitating chug that is stretched out with thuggish yet mesmerically groovesome voice-free abandon. The closing “Reel 41” follows within a similar stream of propulsion, but with supplementary sonic undertows redolent of primordial Spacemen 3 to round things out with almost-bottomless looping concentration.
Served-up in another of co-founder Greg Piwonka’s distinctive Mark Rothkoesque sleeves, the redoubtable Repair is the just drone-ticket to take your senses right to the brink without pushing them into an abyss.
London’s The Leaf Library often appear content to accept and attach drone-indexed tags to their work, either in reference to experimentalist intermissions and side-releases or in relation to components semi-submerged in more melodic moments. Drone-derived equations are certainly expressed amongst the off-piste tracks which are filed and beautifully presented on the 2LP Library Music: Volume Two (WIAIWYA).
Following on from the more portable and still-fresh After The Rain, Strange Seeds studio LP – as profiled on these pages earlier this year – this second archival extraction exercise rummages into all corners of The Leaf Library’s rarities repository with a wider and less straightforwardly chronological remit.
Hence, if 2022’s vital Volume One acted like a merger between Stereolab’s Switched On compendiums, Yo La Tengo’s Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo oddments round-up and the group’s own 2019 double-sized The World Is A Bell album, then this collection also inserts in extra aspects akin to Tortoise’s A Lazarus Taxon boxset and Gastr Del Sol’s more recent We Have Dozens Of Titles compilation. Thus, the anthology spreads out and dispenses itself generously. For the more standalone song-based inclusions it rescues the entirety of The Long Dead King EP’s sublimely lush and propulsive dreaminess (previously only available on a Castles In Space subscription series 12”); baroque-tinged beauty (“Kendrick Road”); and balmy nocturnal American Analog Set stylings (“Building Better Worlds” and “No Memories, No Plans”).For the remaining largely instrumental entries, Library Music: Volume Two shifts between shorter interludes, reworkings and expansive explorations. Respectively, this provides us with wordless tone poems (“Harmonic Runout”, “Bells And Thread” and “Everyone I Met Today”); evocative sideways electronica (the remoulded “Tired Ghost In Orbit” and a Wintergreen remix of “Sailing Day”); and an imagined transcendental twenty-two-minute mash-up between “Gamera”-to-“DJed”-era Tortoise and Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing (“Versatile Clouds”).
An aural labyrinth to let yourself get lost inside repeatedly then, which truly captures The Leaf Library’s variegated quintessence with a marvellously far-reaching but never overblown assemblage of rich material.-Adrian-
