(09.13.06) Robin Storey has a long history of combining abstract art with his
ethno-ambient music and, for his first release for Essense Music, he
provides a number of postcards to accompany From Shadows Sleep.
Trying to match the eleven cards to the eleven tracks gets you lost
in the permutations between the washes of textured color on the prints
and the ghostly ambience of the record.
During the early years following his stint in :zoviet*france:, his
records were minimal to an extreme, distant hints of rhythm buried
beneath slow washes of sound like the subsumed ghosts of forgotten
cultures haunting the echoes of worn canyons and empty riverbeds. In
the late ’90s, Storey began to experiment with loops of language and
the aggressive buzz of noise before venturing into realms of techno
beats and tantric rhythms. From Shadows Sleep is a return to
his roots, stripping away the beats and infinite loops and diving into
dark and phantasmal territories. Storey even admits that some of the
sounds on this record are recycled from previous releases, part of an
effort on his part to rediscover old material with fresh techniques
and older ears. Songs like “The Darkness of Ages” and “The Pit Under
the Castle” hint at the ambience of Darker By Light and the
grittier sound of The Fires of the Borderlands.
The “The Fall of Babylon” is filled with the rhythm of sandpaper, the
persistent brush of grit as it eats away at the foundations of
civilizations. Ethnic sounds decay in the distance, like shadows
weeping, as the gritty noise of the sand — the desert reclaiming that
which has been taken from it — buffs every sign of civilization away.
“The Darkness of Time” sounds like a theater full of reel to reel
tapes running backwards, unspooling old tapes of SETI signals. The
tapes have been left in storage too long and their sounds are
elongated and warped, stretched into lower registers by the
gravitational persistence of time. Whalesong heard through a skein of
metallic drones moan through “The Remembered Chill,” as if the glacial
movement of an ice age has surprised a pod of whales, trapped them in
a slowly thickening sheaf of ice. In “The Cold Sun Rising,” a chorus
of brass and children — their voices stretched into alien tones —
sing a hymn to the dawn, their throaty voices rising rise up into a
hollow sky like a field of mutant sunflowers straining for the weak
sun.
The colors on the postcards are muted, scabbed with dark tones. There
is no structure as in his “Urban Mythology” series, no tans and reds
as from his “Deserts” series. The cards with From Shadows
Sleep are darker, filled with uncertain shapes beneath layers of
scratched and inscribed paint. Both on the cards and in the music on
From Shadows Sleep, you can see and hear Storey examining his
history and scratching at the darker underbelly — a focus that makes
for an darkly arresting record.
From Shadows Sleep is out now on Essence Music.
