4PLAY :: Multi-review for Aquarelle, Ekin Fil, Secret Pyramid, John Davis (Students of Decay)

Below are considered and passing thoughts on four submissions from Alex Cobb‘s ever-diligent Students of Decay (previously on igloomag here and here). Two recent: an update of blown-out axescaping from Ryan Potts’ Aquarelle on the back of a fogbound transmission from Istanbul songstress Ekin Fil—faraway, yet so close in sensibility and source. Two incoming: previews of new recruits—Secret Pyramid, Vancouver-based Amir Abbey’s solo project, and NorCal sound artist/composer, John Davis.

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August Undone finds both change and continuity in Aquarelle’s steepling romantic gruzz—a sound articulated elsewhere as possessed of Horizon Dissolving Mirror-Power comparable to ‘the difference between viewing an abstract painting of normal size from a distance of several feet, and viewing a small swatch of the same painting at a heightened magnification.’ Voicings from Sung in Broken Symmetry, the earlier Slow Circles, and his bit of the split with Head of Decay, Alex Cobb, are evident, but these are even more richly detailed pieces, a few deploying all 64 tracks on Potts’ DAW—stratified, nuanced, resisting the murk. From the outset “Within/Without” surges forth in analogue fuzz blooms, piano tones chiming within the guitar squall beside sinewave slivers in an early hint of Aquarelle’s evolution of sound. “This Is No Monument” morphs over its course, a vast wall of guitar fuzz and distant chimes in a slow dissolve, receding to the liminal then riding a wave of chord cascades against radiant microtone-drone—micro-explosions in the caco-/sym-phonic sky. Swathes of crystalline fog—ever-shifting overwhelming, transcending—a seeming spiritual connection comes in the repeated tri-notes of “A Flare,” referencing “Ode to Joy.” Some will reach for usual suspects Tim Hecker and Fennesz, but casting the referential net wider would capture the likes of Birchville Cat Motel and Alex Cobb’s own now-defunct Taiga Remains. Dreampop and neo-classical abstraction in endless looping layers of guitars, banjos, reeds, and pianos processed to the other end of oblivion. The closing “Clockless Hours” has an engulfing static drone yield to a felicitous piano and cello encounter. August Undone ends up a palpable step forward from a questing musician at the top of his game.

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Opening for Grouper in Istanbul in 2009 connected Ekin Üzeltüzenci to Jefre-Cantu-Ledesma’s Root Strata and an evolving US West-coast ambient-psych-folk scene. This led to the hazy low-light scenes of Language—frayed swathes clung to by half-formed vocal wraiths trailing ghost-melodies through shadowy zones. The s/t Ekin Fil lightens a little in its fusion of folk with organic ambience. A more refined kind of crepuscular balladry harking back to early-mid 90s lo-fi space folk; echoes of Jessica Bailiff, Roy Montgomery, and cross-pond kin FSA, join trajectories with late re-found sounds from kindred spirit sisters in veiled song-sonics, the aforementioned Grouper, maybe Motion Sickness of Time Travel. Ethereal dissolves of electric guitar and ghostly chorals of inarticulate speech of the heart form into dissipative reveries. “Anything Anywhere” sets the tone with occluded synth-lines and guitar chords enmeshing behind veils of soft feedback drift, static-swathed harmonies smeared over emergent melodies. Minor-key chords and echo-treated voice emissions fill with aqueous drizzle and sirens in the haunted night of “Two Stars.” The mournful “Sea Holly” seems to spew guitar and keyboard from a vast echo chamber. “Father” and “Forever” further frail meanderings wreathed in shadows—angelic ambiguity in cavernous resonance. The Grouper legacy is strong, but Uzeltüzenci’s gauzy songcraft is more detailed and mid-fi than Harris’s desaturations. As Ekin Fil drifts in suspension, errant melodies snagging the ear, gossamer textures bewildering amid unresolving cadences, it stakes claim to its own terrain, its devotionals cohering into a strangely compelling far-off whole.

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While we’re in the Decay loop, brief notice of the two upcoming Autumn releases—to be revisited at greater length on release. First up, there’s Secret Pyramid, solo project of Vancouver-based Amir Abbey, known to some for his work as one part of drone-rockers, Solars. His Movements of Night finds him apparently refining and developing the haunting faraway sound-world that garnered previous cassette release, The Silent March, much-merited plaudits. We can look forward to ‘throbbing cycles of low-end’ as Abbey “masterfully navigates the properties of sleep and unconsciousness, charting a course that is equal parts harrowing and funereal, tranquil and sublime.’ Seemingly ‘adept at juxtaposing the everyday with the obscured, with half-there melodies and arcs of hazy guitar histrionics.” Then there’s Northern Californian dreamer John Davis, a man with previous form on Root Strata and Digitalis. His Ask the Dust is a suite of pieces made with a host of instrumentation incl. guitar, piano, tape loops, tweaked with Max/MSP, infused with field recordings and “a complex assortment of Blacet synthesizer modules.” The latter, we are told, Davis uses “not as the crux of his recordings but as a tool among many in his kit, weaving oscillations and mangled or rhythmic tones through pastoral webs of processed guitar and field recordings.’ Attended by talk of the richness of his palette and ‘his prowess as a masterful arranger of abstract sound’ and the album heralded as ‘striking in its attention to detail and compositional deftness,’ well might we feel teased at the prospect of what is ‘easily Davis’ most refined set of recordings to date, a deep album that rewards focused and repeated listening.”