The sky, regardless of marginalia, is hymned as winsome, as radiant, as before; but by adding new skin to the old ceremony, finding a natural beauty in non-nature, or rather endowing with naturalism something seemingly other.
Another installment of ‘micro-orchestral music played with minimalist economy‘ from the New Forest’s finest purveyors of Ecstatic Drone. Strongly naturist–even animist–in spirit, Pausal‘s work has always been themed with nature through visual or textual signifiers–from EP‘s and Autumnal‘s foliage to the fronds and fauna of Lapses and Forms. The bold neo-realist urban landscape of their latest album’s artwork is thus even more striking, though closer scrutiny reveals Sky Margin as carrying on, with some subtly significant tweaks, where Forms (and Autumnal, Lapses, and EP) left off.
Changed in content rather than form, the Pausal process is preserved while subject shifts. Their blending of instrumentation, field and vinyl recordings with digital and guitar pedal processing remains, but palpably different–familiar cadences with some unfamiliar detail, drier and noisier timbres peeking from within fathoms-deep drone-wash; pervasive cumulo-nimbic strata all present and correct, and flecked as if with high-end tinnitus. The song-ambiance remains the same–‘a shimmering haze of humid ambience and sparkling field recordings,’ and ‘billowing, vaporous, and cloud-like…’ (press blurb). “Vapour” ascends rapidly into expansive drone, field sounds liminally striking the ear more constructed than customary, as if their vestigial tempos and pitch roughage were meant to mirror surface textures of urban structures. The flaws in apparent uniformity take on leitmotif status: “Distance” with its below-billows glitch traces; “Trails” bringing a granularized ‘verbed-out counterpoint to all but efface its keynote chord progression; “Celestial” arcing skywards, swelling and dipping, twin drawn out tones oscillating in and around each other with subtle tonal differences eventually in Kosmische convergence; “Topography”’s denouement in bursts of field recordings… and more in between till the final “Utopian” cavernously opens, building to a crescendo of yawning tonemass, final strains of space-static smeared music box motif ending in silence… then poignant recursion… poignant recursion.
Overall, then, these cosmo-pastoral knob-twiddlers seem to seek to absorb the flaws, the rough edges of the cityscape, akin to rendering them into their sound. There is a sense of the listening subject’s ‘gaze’ being taken as if on a kind of above-rooftops flâneur’s dérive. The sky, regardless of marginalia, is hymned as winsome, as radiant, as before; but by adding new skin to the old ceremony, finding a natural beauty in non-nature, or rather endowing with naturalism something seemingly other, Pausal show an evolution from early-days DIY ambience into a sonically more finely crafted, musically more developed, entity, while retaining their authenticity of voice.
Sky Margin is available on Own.
