Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 has about it a melancholic cast, more rainy-day Autumnal evening than sun-dappled Aestival afternoon.
A review of Anthropology Vol. 1 (2009) prompted this author to invoke The Grain of the Voice, Roland Barthes‘ essay on the voice’s potential to tap into some embodiment beyond words, melody, even conventional meaning. Despite a dearth in Dent’s work of sung song (and in the face of Barthes’ author-cidal tendencies), it seemed apt to convey his way with ‘a semiotics of sound colour in which text cedes to texture, and audio kicks come from tuning into tone tricks over lyrics,’ as it explained, ‘… its lines—liquid, labyrinthine—and the sounding arc of its dives—the shiver in its timbres—bring to mind the idea of grain,’ pointing ‘the sound’s sheer materiality and bodily affect.’ Now, five years on from that oceanic first volume, come another two, Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3, Dent’s bent, again, boldly maximalist—in productivity and production—with over 25 tracks breaking 140 minutes, reportedly several years in the making, for the estimable Infraction.
Dent’s anthropological ambit covers a wide field drawing on an archaeology of post-rock and modern classical as well as the more obvious ambient and drone. He himself once identified in his work ‘a tension between two traditions, one being what you could call “new composition” (Eno, Budd, Johannsen, Basinski, Part, etc) and “new music” (Cage, Niblock, Ehlers, Rehberg, Ambarchi, Fennesz, etc)’ (Tokafi, 2007). And little has changed in this latest set of micro-orchestral manoeuvres. Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 is another long drawn out suite of sustained tones and shifting harmonies—slow-flow symphonies in evaporating tones with piano punctuation. Thin wisps flit through the spaces in relatively reined-in moments such as “Morning Hunt” and “Passages from a Thief’s Journal.” Such tracks, though, are engulfed by the likes of “Contraries” and “The Jealous Potter” wherein mood drifts from awe to elegy over shivering timbres of synth glissandi and slow unfurling tone-clouds. Dent moulds shadows and fog into forms amenable to any number of images and narratives; hazy, gauzy, pillowed, billowing …quiet flicker, muffled rumble, spectral whisper.
Overall, Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 has about it a melancholic cast, more rainy-day Autumnal evening than sun-dappled Aestival afternoon. Timbres vary from thick and textured, corrosive and chordal, to hushed and minimal, smooth and crystalline, ranging from chthonic dark ambient to diaphanous drift. Overall, though, the divide is not that evident, with pretty and delicate seguing seamlessly into more eerie and harsh, one infused with elements of the other—not so much balanced between light and dark as holding within it both at once. The outcome is a strangely haunting set, with enough grain and grit for deeper diving, while blissed and tranquil enough to be OST to late-night languors and long drifts into the void.
Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 is available on Infraction.
http://youtu.be/sPo2BXxUD0o
