There are unseen depths here. A record to take in slowly, one listening at a time—but beautiful and rewarding.
Wide spaces and unseen depths
Even if you haven’t heard of Daniel McCagh, chances are you’ve heard his work. As a sound designer and composer, he worked with brands like Volkswagen, Huawei and Acura—names which all convey a sense of streamlined modernity, but also corporate ruthlessness. On his debut record Altered States, McCagh unfolds the skills he acquired from working in such pro environments and gives us a more personal artistic statement.
There is an immediate contrast between the delicate piano and plucks of the opening track “Twisting and Turning” and the heavy, distorted kick and snare pattern of “Leviathan Spine,” the following piece. Immediately, we understand that the focus of this album is going to be sound, the way it can be designed, the way it can fill space. The violins brush against each other with contained febrility. The snare hits relentlessly in the background. Later, on “Untitled,” these cellos, free of the rhythmical basis, will swarm and buzz like bees in a concert hall.
The album is mostly comprised of shorter cuts, half of them being under the four-minute mark, and several among these are under two minutes. In the same way. The musical ideas are concise, varied, and do not overstay their welcome. When longer pieces hit, like the title track or the closer (“Remnants”), the effect is heightened—while these are not hour-long ambient soundscapes, we are still transported to their wide spaces. What we hear in the track “Altered States” is a pretty good summary of the album’s mission statement: there is a languishing sense of melody, long sustained notes reaching out, while underneath a mossy industrial beat moves on with the regularity and the weight of square wheels.
This contrast between heavy and weightless declines over the course of this record—not only between tracks (the harmonic release and simplicity of “Subsume” after “Epoch I”) or between frequencies, or choice of sounds and instruments, but also between different approaches to composition. There are unseen depths here. A record to take in slowly, one listening at a time—but beautiful and rewarding.
Altered States is available on n5MD.
