(04.21.05) Frozen Rabbit is the dark ambient drone collaboration between Phil
Western and Tim Hill, veterans of the Vancouver, B. C., music scene.
Western’s (Skinny Puppy, Download, Plateau and others) and Hill’s
(Living with Mould Orchestra) previous collaborations were more dance
floor friendly — little beat missives meant to get your butt wiggling
on the lighted tiles. Frozen Rabbit is a straight shot in the
opposite direction — a beeline made for the ambient horizon, beats
and bass stripped away as extraneous noises in the pursuit of endless
sustain, infinite reverb and a shimmering wall of hazy sound.
26,000 is a record that changes slowly like tides eating away
at limestone cliffs yet the intensity of its movement is ferocious.
“Never Say Forever” hesitates on the cusp of eruption, a white light
moment that is full of potential and yet never quite reaches critical
mass. Tones build against a groaning background of slumbering drones
and, for seven and a half minutes, you are left hanging, waiting for
that next instant of time when the Big Bang, the White Light, the
sundering of Time and Space — any of these things! — occurs. It
never does and the energy drains away into the spectral chorus and
cross-fading notes of floating stringed instruments of “Isolate Now.”
A human voice sings in the round in “26,000,” a recursive vocal loop
that goes Ouroboros-like for its own tail. “Cold Morning” bristles
like an ice haze scouring across a frozen tundra.
26,000 is a ritual record, an experiment in psychedelic
ambience where throat singers and ghostly porn stars are bent to the
same task, where drones are warped and bent out of shape, where the
glacial change of tonality and texture are the norm and where your
breath is ultimately meant to be suspended, caught between the last
exhalation of one “OHM” and the slow lung expansion of the next
iteration of the cycle. I keep waiting for something to happen in
26,000 and maybe that’s the whole feverish point of the record:
something might happen. It’s a model of restraint, a coiled
serpent of sound that never strikes. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t
dangerous.
26,000 is out now on Dehausset.
