Strange storytelling, field recordings dusted in gray, gentle melancholy strings, and tribal electronic rhythms, meet stuttering voices and spell casting as sing-songing in a realm of wondrous enchantment.
Quiet restraint, careful composition, and intricate editing
How the Night Falls is how the dream begins, and when this record starts purring its way through a stereo system, the dreams fall thickly, blanketing consciousness first in shades of twilight, then in the dark hours of night, and finally in the wee hours when the rapid movement of the eyeballs is at its most intense before the dawn.
It starts off with a song of somber heaviness, “Moonlight,” full with the weight of emotion and mystery, but the record makes a quick cut into sounds that are almost silly with the playful electronics and saxophone on “Wrong Number.” The spoken and enunciated word is central to the collection of songs here, much of it from the voice of Mike Seed, who makes up one half of this duo. R. Loftiss gives her voice and weight to these excursions as well. Songs like “Hide Therefore Thine Eyes” leave me reeling. It’s held down by a steady tribal drum beat and sing-song chanting. But her voice also gets glitched, edited, spliced, transformed, terraformed into a new terrain… and it all makes me wonder how some of the most beautiful music that exists is still buried in obscurity.
I first became aware of the work of R. Loftiss when I started reviewing material from her different releases on her label Anticlock Records. I heard some wonderful music from her own project The Gray Field Recordings, as well as material she released by wonderful artists in sound like her friend Mike Seed, Stone Breath and Language of Light as well as The Howling Larsons. This latter is a group she is in with her husband Alan Trench, former co-head of the late legendary label and music distributor World Serpent. There was also music from the Oklahoma based family freakout band Ctephin, among others. All of the music she put on her label really hit a sweet spot for me, tickling my interests and obsessions with both acid folk, wryd folk and ritual ambient. If you are a fan of the kind of regularly covered by Ptolemaic Terrascope, you are getting into the right territory and mindset.
Even though Anticlock slowed down as a label, much of the same crew of artists came to be represented by another excellent label Reverb Worship. Loftiss has lately been busy as one of the forces of nature behind that strangest of supergroups, Black Lesbian Fishermen. With a name like that, how can you go wrong. It demands to be listened to! I’d go on a musical fishing trip with Black Lesbian Fishermen any day…
Loftiss herself was originally from Oklahoma but is now based in Greece, where Alan and her have a family and continue to make strange sounds.
Loftiss has been a frequent collaborator with a number of musicians and had worked with Mike Seed often in the past on various tracks, as well as putting out his music on Anticlock. With the The Winter Residence they join forces for the first time as a proper official project and it is very proper indeed.
Strange storytelling, field recordings dusted in gray, gentle melancholy strings, and tribal electronic rhythms, meet stuttering voices and spell casting as sing-songing in a realm of wondrous enchantment.” ~Justin Patrick Moore
A hinge on which the door to other realities creaks ::
Strange storytelling, field recordings dusted in gray, gentle melancholy strings, and tribal electronic rhythms, meet stuttering voices and spell casting as sing-songing in a realm of wondrous enchantment.
The record could be filed under “hallucinatory folk-drone.” The piece “Act of Devotion” is as somnolent as the opener, but wordless, a lamp shining into dark astral worlds. A simple melody plays around glistening fibers of gently distorted noise. Then “Randalls Ghost” comes on, a rendition of a traditional ballad to a scary electronic backdrop. The creepiness factor gets leveled up and then turns into a truly frightening drone piece full of scraping and creepy gurgling voices. As the longest song, it is something of the centerpiece, a hinge on which the door to other realities creaks as it opens onto the otherworld.
“A Song to Bind Me” is another one where the voice is the centerpiece. Seed sings an occult poem accompanied to very understated bits of abstract sound, like buzzing insects, and the echo of a lost field recording. The title song is a short number of plucked strings and the voice of R. Loftiss that lingers for all its brevity, like a soul lingering at the gate of dreams, all covered over with ivy. Two more wyrd folk numbers round out this beautiful album. Quiet restraint, careful composition, and intricate editing define How The Night Falls. I’ll be looking forward to future close collaborations between Mike Seed and R. Loftiss.
How the Night Falls is available on Bandcamp.
