Hollydrift is not for everyone. Let’s just get that out of the way up front, so
those who are timid or easily put off can find something else with which to occupy
their time. For those who have a streak of white lightning running through their
spine, there is Hollydrift. It’s not white noise; it’s not pop music; it’s doesn’t
even have verses and choruses. Waiting For The Tiller is a collage of sound; it is
Hollydrift’s summation of the post-industrial landscape of the newly born WWII
generation. It is the sound of new machines slowly creeping across old fields, the
sound of radio signals tentatively reaching for the stars and interacting with the
wild swoop and ping of space noises. It creaks and whistles and moans like an
ancient wind redolent with the oil stains of history, and it drones and hums with
the electrified breath of radio transmitters. I’m in love, I think.
Equal parts Wilt, Coil, Scanner, Stone Glass Steel, and Meat Beat Manifesto (okay,
that’s a lie — I’m just referencing “Intermission” from RUOK?), Waiting For The
Tiller is an aural collage that is, as Mathias Anderson has said himself, a “smear”
of sound. It has no beats and no discernable melodies you can tap your foot to. It
is simply a wash of noise, an amalgamation of sound that moves past you, obscuring
the sun and casting a shadow across your face. It is a collection of sounds which
pool at night beneath your window and influence your dreams. It is static and wind,
field recordings and intercepted transmissions, processed noises and raw audio.
There will be sounds you find frustratingly familiar (like that drone which runs
through most of “From An Old Horizon”), and there will be alien noises which sound
like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
Hollydrift has put out a dark ambient radio transmission. You’ve dialed in to some
tiny laboratory out of a dark wood and, for the duration of the hour that he
transmits, time and space are compressed and elongated. There is a mighty
centrifuge running in Hollydrift’s studio and what we hear is the cream Anderson
pulls from his whirling concoction of noise, voices, field recordings, and radio
signals. It’s an audio soup — crackling with its own supercharged energy — that
gets poured into a funnel and blown like a mist of excited particles into the ether
where your tiny radio becomes infected. Excellent.
Waiting For The Tiller is out now on Parasomnic Records.
