Matter is shaped into dense oppressive drone-slabs of staticky churn; ghosts of settlers skulk in the shadows of its inky contours.
Canadian wild frontiersman Damian Valles visits territory similar to Badlands frequented previously–sites of desolation and harshness hymned via guitar and piano, processed with percussive and field captures, vast vistas evoked of derelict Southern Gothic. Last year Valles also engaged in outsider ambient tone-wrangling with like-mind Brit axescapist Talvihorros on Monuments and Ruins as well as pursuing other lost worlds on Nonparallel (In Four Movements). If anything, Exposure is even more bereft than those works of musical comforts–the likes of melody, harmony, warmth of tone color all by-passed by Valles in grim pursuit of his theme of erosion and annihilation.
Exposure delves so deep into ominous drone and ambient noise that even familiars might not have seen such darkness coming. But lest facile equations of darkness + ambience be made, be advised this is not the Dark Ambient™ beloved of Nordic nihilists in thrall to thanatos and eschaton. Valles’ ambit is elsewhere–curating a tension of spare, if sometimes extreme, sonorities, precisely defined materials set in spatio-temporal trajectory. Though expressive means are as previous, from opening “Lost Equilibrium,” perspective is evidently different, piling a pall of confusion overhead (see artwork), a freight of existential Angst infused in its rusted drones; from gaseous emissions in what might be the depths of a ventilator shaft comes a sense of suffocation. The shivering strings of “Weathered 2” are bowed and scraped, twisted into a rusted sculpture that chafes the senses. The clangor of “Weathered One,” like something wicked this way comes, pounding metallically against the walls of your shed into unending night. Thus is a scene of ill portent gradually set, as if preparing the way for the more extreme excavations of centrepiece “Vacuums,” ringing, reverberating, wind wracked and ruined. Largely atonal, it offers little to hang on to but an internal dynamism of minimal manoeuvres–a drone, a synth pulse… a lone cowbell. Matter is shaped into dense oppressive drone-slabs of staticky churn; ghosts of settlers skulk in the shadows of its inky contours.
Something of a Bard of The Bleak, then, Valles summons to his retreat–to a cold exposed place to stare long into the void. Exposure is an archaeology of unfolding contours of isolation, perhaps not from human life, but from safety, warmth. Yet somehow sometimes comes a sense of repose–of remotion, as if in contemplation of… who knows…
Exposure is available on Vox-xov Records*
*Vox-xov was launched, prior to first full release, Hakobune’s Nebulous Sequences, with two free comps, one IDM/electronic, the other Ambient Drone, including a Damian Valles track, “Continuum.” (below)
