Plenty of room is left amongst the arrangements to allow the mind to wander, for images to be conjured, for the music to wrap itself around you.
Comprising eleven pieces of lush rapturous sound, Atomos continues the great work of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran’s self-titled debut album under their A Winged Victory for the Sullen moniker. Atomos is composed for Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company ballet piece of the same name; despite being written for dancers, this work exists in beautiful isolation as unaccompanied music.
Those familiar with the previous work of the artists involved will have much to enjoy here; it continues the sound of their first album, drifting glassy electronic drone-waves are combined with small-scale chamber group orchestration. The strings curtsy weeping long bowed passes that dissipate into nothing as heavy clumping piano chords thud in melancholic sudden stops. Violins and cellos circle each other in graceful arcing curves. Swells of rising bass rise in humps only to scatter like a handful of dust thrown into the air. The use of electronics is more evident that in the group’s previous work, clicks, chopped vocals and humming wobble shudder in close symbiosis with the acoustic ingredients.
Music as emotive and laden with sadness as this can often produce apathy in listeners, a gloom descending over time that deadens interest and engagement. A Winged Victory for the Sullen avoids this throughout by a simple abundance of space; plenty of room is left amongst the arrangements to allow the mind to wander, for images to be conjured, for the music to wrap itself around you. When the sound thickens it is blissful in its directness, music as an unwavering comforting embrace; greatly and lastingly moving.
Atomos is a haunting and graceful reminder of the simple magic of music, the ability of composed arrangements of sound to hypnotize and quietly devastate; a soft and calming destruction, a hollowing out of a person until all that is left is their mind, dancing in perfect step with the music in an endless weightless enormity.
Atomos is available on Erased Tapes / Kranky.
