An exercise in what could have been—in a sense, perhaps a fitting conclusion to the Boc Scadet project itself.
Boc Scadet is Lawrence Grover’s best-known alias, under which he released two previous albums and two EP’s through the mid-2000s. Nightfall in Gentle Waters, the third and final entry in Boc Scadet’s arc, was previously only available on an ultra-limited run of 100 copies as Unlabel’s series 52 #16, but has now been remastered and re-released digitally on Illinois-based Sun Sea Sky Productions’ Bandcamp page.
I’m a devout Boc Scadet fan, I’ll freely confess. For me, the melodic electro/idm stylings of Temporary Oceans and the Yleptic EP (reviewed previously on Igloo) just as they were released on Grover’s own clickclickdrone imprint mark a high point in the aesthetic first set out by Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, and specifically by the early Autechre tracks included on those compilations (“Chatter,” “Crystel” and “The Egg”) —a spacious, Detroit-influenced leftfield electro/techno hybrid that rewarded close listening. Indeed, “Boc Scadet” as a name is undeniably evocative of (and, apocryphally, derived from) the “Basscadet” single off Autechre’s initial Warp release Incunabula. The Toytronic label took up this torch, and their Everything Is Green compilation united diverse artists working in a similar mode of expression. (It should be unsurprising that I find Grover’s contribution “Sel Alterat” the highlight of the release.)
So it’s with all this history in mind that I have to express my disappointment with Nightfall in Gentle Waters. It’s not that it’s nearly beatless—let alone undecorated with Yleptic‘s meticulously placed percussion—after all, much of 2005’s Vessel in June floated in similarly ambient waters. But unlike tracks like Vessel‘s transcendent “Alaska”, much of Nightfall seems unfinished and altogether too brief. There’s barely anything here that goes past the three-minute mark and tracks like “Verse” scarcely have the chance to resolve themselves into a coherent idea before they fade out.
It’s a shame too because there are some nice moments. “Like Larks” boasts a strong stabbed-out melody and the spacious bleepiness of “Hide and Seek” hints at a Casino vs Japan-esque song lurking behind the curtain, waiting for its moment… which never comes. Instead the song fades out before reaching 120 seconds of length. The ambience is pretty enough and there are great moody atmospheres with sonic qualities that would serve well as a soundtrack to slow-pan cinematography like Ron Fricke’s 1985 classic Chronos, but the fantastic thing about atmospheric ambient music in that mode is following a stately progression from emptiness to fullness and back to the void, and Nightfall denies us the feeling that its ideas are able to reach their fullest expression.
In a sense the strength of the ideas and the potential behind their development make Nightfall in Gentle Waters ultimately that much more frustrating a listening experience. It’s an exercise in what could have been—in a sense, perhaps a fitting conclusion to the Boc Scadet project itself, from which has Grover moved on, leaving its devotees searching for a way to regain that elusive apex he showed us and then relinquished.
Nightfall in Gentle Waters is available on Sun Sea Sky Productions’ Bandcamp page.
