VISÆGES

Visæges is the final album from a trilogy of releases that I've been working on simultaneously since the end of last summer. I have mentioned this before in some of my last few posts but I'd like to describe the process again: sometime during last summer I started recording songs and eventually accumulated a formidable batch that I realized could be divided up by three distinct styles. I decided to create three different records from these songs, the first being the atmospheric EP, Dragonscales & Lambskin, comprised of mostly ambient pieces, the second was the mellow and largely acoustic guitar psych-folk LP Lily of the Valley, and finally Visæges. I had originally intended to release this album a few months ago, a little closer to the release of Lily, but I got sidetracked by Neon Panopticon. As a result, Visæges is perhaps the longest I've ever taken to work on an album with some breaks of a few weeks in between the overall process, which has been a couple months shy of a year. 

I feel this long gestation period has yielded one of my strongest albums so far or at least one of my personal favorites, one that offers a substantial running time of just over 50 minutes but hopefully isn't too long and self-indulgent. By my standards, this record is sturdy and lean with ambient experimentation nearly non-existent. Instead, this is a heavily krautrock-indebted affair (of the Neu mold) with half of the songs powered by motorik beats and pumping basslines, with the other half largely being austere and industrial-tinged post-punk jams. The artwork was very much inspired by Joy Division's album art (and graphic designer Peter Saville's work in general) as well as Death in June's artwork style. Basically, this album was intended to be a rather dehumanized exploration of slowly building up songs through repetition and seeing how nuances emerge in that repetition before dismantling them.

DOWNLOAD:
VISAEGES (LP)

NEON PANOPTICON

Neon Panopticon is a sorta mini-LP or a longer EP...it lies somewhere between an EP and LP in length, at least in terms of my albums, which can be admittedly a bit on the long side at times. While the word "panopticon" was appealing because "icon" can be found at the end of it, the interest in the word extended beyond mere graphic possibilities. It is partially inspired by a recent personal experience with law authority but also by the concept of the "panopticon" as developed in the late 18th century by Jeremy Bentham. For those unfamiliar, Bentham's concept basically describes a specifically designed prison in which an ominous guard tower sits atop and at the center of the circular structure with the rest of the prison and all the cells built into the surrounding circle. The key idea being that from this guard tower at the institution's core the guards can observe anything and everything from their position while the inmates are unable to see the jailers in the high tower and will hopefully behave themselves never knowing for sure if they're being watched. More importantly, the key ideas of the panopticon were later adopted by French philosopher Michel Foucault who applied them to his theories on social conformity and power structures. I was also thinking about the idea of "death" or "suicide" by cop while recording this album; to purposely end one's own life through an aggressive (although sometimes hardly threatening at all) manner of endangering a cop's (or multiple cops) life. Often, this is the ultimate escape route taken out of desperation because of an extreme situation, which is perhaps more often the case than someone simply planning suicide and seeking out police to execute (pun intended!) the plan.

And so, the album is kind of a loose conceptual piece about these aspects of social authority, conformity and structures with the first (and titular) track being a sprawling 20 minute long epic about the panopticon in a sense, structured somewhat in a circular style with the opening 4 minutes of a more "traditional" nature, resembling a post-punk type of track (sort of like the more uplifting Joy Division songs or the earlier ones by New Order). That opening movement gives way to the bulk of the track, a heavily atmospheric middle section in which thick slabs of drone are layered over each other, smothered in reverb and disoriented loops, haunted by cavernous vocals with moaning calls and hypnotic chants. The song circle is "closed" following the psychedelic cacophony of this middle section as a motorik beat-infused song slowly builds out of the ambiance, propelling forwards and upwards with a driving rhythm that eventually climaxes into a rather joyfully grandiose finale. The intention was to reinforce this loosely circular concept by not only the bookend movements but also the melody similarity shared predominantly between these two movements, as well as in a much more subtle manner throughout the middle section.

The second, and shortest at less than 5 minutes, track is perhaps the least conceptually-relevant song but I liked the double entendre quality of the title that is hopefully obvious. Sonically, I feel it is a kindred spirit with the first and last movements of the opening track; as it is, like those sections, driven by a bouncy krautrock style beat, and then accompanied by a fairly bittersweet melody on the bass guitar and guitars, which is then emphasized by some glockenspiel and melodica. The last track is a massive beast of relentless bass throb and break-beat-esque drums that are fairly repetitive for most of the 15+ minutes, although with some nuanced changes. Spread over the restless rhythm section are echoing guitars, vocal loops, a wailing slide guitar, drones, and other nigh-unrecognizable psychedelic sounds. Perhaps it goes without saying for some but the dominating influence over this song is Can's "Halleluhwah" the mammoth centerpiece on their masterpiece Tago Mago (1971), as well as "Oh Yeah" to a slightly lesser extent.

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NEON PANOPTICON

RiFF RaFF

Here's a video interview with rapper RiFF RaFF (who was sorta "discovered" by Harmony Korine apparently and serves as the inspiration for the James Franco character in Korine's new film Spring Breakers, which I can't wait to see by the way) that was recently brought to my attention. He gives a rather interesting interview but says something particularly interesting when asked about the title of his new book at 2:38...I'm speechless about this strange coincidence.

LILY OF THE VALLEY

 

Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis) is indeed the same name of a flowering plant that has a rich history and reputation that's intertwined with both the crucifixion and second coming of Christ, Germanic and Pagan mythology, and Breaking Bad. The plant's red berries are notorious for deceiving children as a small edible fruit that instead poisons its victims. I felt the plant's namesake would lend itself well to the album because of this deceptive nature, the idea of beauty belying a poisonous core.

As mentioned in my previous post, Lily of the Valley is an LP culled together from the recording sessions that started in summer 2012 and yielded a hefty batch of tracks varying in styles, moods and structures. The differing quality of this unwieldy collection of material would have made for a gargantuan album far more excessive in its self-indulgence than my previous LP effort, the double album The Lygath Tree. Appropriately, I realized that the material could be divided up into three distinct groups: ambient drones (which became my previous release the EP Dragonscales & Lambskin), psychedelic freak folk of a sort (which became this album), and songs largely inspired by krautrock and post-punk (which will become the next LP soon to be titled and completed).

As described, the songs of Lily of the Valley are predominantly psychedelic in texture and freak folk in structure although I would say this is perhaps the more obvious way to describe them because I used an acoustic guitar for most if not all of the songs. I feel as though the resulting tracks have a delicate and bittersweet quality to them generally, with gentle or emotional melodies that almost sound like wordless ballads to me. To think about these songs as pretty little flowers with poisonous berries, evoking the Lily of the Valley metaphor, characterizes them largely with "pretty" sounds (catchy melodies, elegant instrumentation, ethereal vocals) but there are subtle undercurrents of a "poison" (moody ambient tones and dark drones) running often beneath the flowery exteriors.

While there remains my usual sense of experimentalism I feel like I made a notable effort to write and construct tracks that were somewhat more accessible and traditional in structure. That said, the majority of the album contains instrumentals with most of the vocal work acting more as a sonic texture than a focal point. The track "I Know What You're Thinking" is the only track with a relatively conventional vocal arrangement and it features a chorus of several layers of my voice. The only other song somewhat characterized by vocals is "Impulse/Gesture" although it is considerably less prominent and is obscured by reverb and echo. The track is divided into two halves, as suggested by the title, with a common drone theme running through each half; exemplary of how song structure is occasionally experimented with on the album. "Idyllic Spring" is noteworthy for its unconventional structure as well, in which the main guitar melody, played fairly straightforward for the track's majority, eventually breaks down to an atmosphere of drones, piano echoes and the sounds of water, only to be resurrected and finish out the song.

As mentioned, I feel as if generally the bulk of the album was intended to be slightly more traditional and accessible in structure with a few exceptions. "Black Sea" being a roaming epic of ambient textures as a dense ocean of moaning vocals flow over sustained melodica notes and twinkling treated glockenspiel bells. "Demon Lover" falls into a similar category with twin acoustic guitar rhythms played against one another beneath a swirling mass of weepy bowed dulcimer strings and warped tape hiss, which also features the only other musician on the album, Ross Brunson.

DOWNLOAD:
LILY OF THE VALLEY (LP)

DRAGONSCALES & LAMBSKIN

 

Dragonscales & Lambskin is an EP but it's pretty long for an EP at nearly 40 minutes of music, four of the five tracks being average song lengths. But the final, title track is a twenty minute long epic of ambient movements that bookend a short middle movement that breaks up the thick atmospheric fog of loops, drones and twinkling sounds for a simple instrumental garage ballad that plays out a tender guitar melody against maracas and tambourine only to be swallowed up once again by the dense foreboding ambiance. As this track and the rest of the songs attest to, Dragonscales & Lambskin is largely an ambient record. Many of these tracks were recorded during the end of the summer while I've been recording material for an upcoming LP to be titled Lily of the Valley, and most of these songs were originally intended for that album but as the amount of material for Lily has been building up to be wildly diverse in styles I decided to create a separate EP with the more experimental, droney tracks. In fact, the rest of the Lily songs have become so distinctly one style (psych-folk) or another (krautrock, post-punk) that from that divided bulk will come two separate LPs now instead of the intended one. So stay tuned for those upcoming albums but for now, this is a fine preview of this past summer's recording labors.

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DRAGONSCALES & LAMBSKIN (EP)

THE LYGATH TREE

Opening up H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at random has proven to be a particularly fruitful giving tree of inspiring creativity for me, being that it lent itself to the album title and its track names of my own The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath album from a few months ago and now this. I still have yet to read the book but flipping through it at random once again when searching for inspiration one day I came across the words "the Lygath Tree", which I don't believe is a real type of tree but I really liked the sound of the words themselves. I decided that the otherworldly quality of the words would fit quite well with my album and this idea of the familiar yet foreign, such as what a Lygath Tree represents to me: something that we all know like a tree that is given a new, ambiguous form through the creative mind.

Production on The Lygath Tree started in September 2011 and occurred off and on until this month with no particular goal or clear aesthetic theme set in mind for most of that period. During those several months whenever I would record a track that didn't fit into any of my other albums-in-progress I would relegate it to the folder that eventually became The Lygath Tree. Eventually I noticed that this collection of tracks was growing considerably and soon it contained nearly 40 songs. The unwieldy amount of music that developed was indeed fairly diverse in song structure but overall similar in tone and theme. I decided that despite the prolonged period of time over which it was recorded the material generally worked well as a cohesive epic album. And although it was indeed shaping up into something one could describe as "grand in scope" there was still no doubt that the amount of tracks needed to be edited down, some being less interesting than the rest, and others sacrificed simply to cut down on the overall album length. I eventually settled on a solid, round number of 30 tracks that would be divided into two volumes, effectively making it my first double album for each half contained 15 songs and roughly an hour of music. While I was initially hesitant about the notion of releasing a double album because it seemed a little too self-indulgent, I eventually concluded that I enjoyed the bulk of the material too much to scrap half of the tracks and also didn't want to break up the thematic continuity that might occur if I had just turned them into two different albums.

And while it might've made sense in a way to divide them into separate but complimentary albums due to the fact that there are an almost equal amount of ambient tracks as there are (somewhat) traditionally structured songs, I've always been fascinated with albums that are made up of equal parts ambient and rock songs (examples that come to mind, perhaps: Brian Eno's Another Green World, David Bowie's Low, Deerhunter's Cryptograms). I enjoy albums of this dualistic nature that more or less split themselves into two deliberately contrasting halves (Low, for example, contains a first half comprised of funky pop kraut-style numbers but also a very different second half of moody, minimal ambient pieces) but I sometimes prefer the idea of intermingling these contrasting song styles (like the way Another Green World sprinkles its miniature atmospheric gems throughout a continuity of post-glam jams and ballads) and chose this route for sequencing The Lygath Tree's track order. Thus, each volume contains a mostly equal share of rock-type songs and ambient soundscapes in a frequently alternating chronology.

As for the sounds themselves, there are a lot of my signature drones present created by various instruments: keyboards, guitars, vocals, as well as a frequent use of tribal style drumming. The structured songs range from jangly garage pop to plodding post-punk dirges to psychedelic freak/neo-folk, although nearly all tracks (with very few exceptions), even those with voices, are essentially instrumental. Like with most of my albums, I worked on most of the songs almost exclusively alone, with the occasional collaborator. For the track "Hermetic Harangue" I collaborated with Omid Bazaei, it being one of the last songs recorded for the album, and features our attempts at moaning vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar and dulcimer textures, and glockenspiel. Another recently recorded track is "Deer Park", a reworking of an old song that Alex Vacar and myself wrote for our noise/experimental band City of Meat (circa 2008-2009) that was a favorite of mine from that period and felt like it might be interesting to re-record it but using different instruments and adding a few new elements too. The Lygath Tree might be a little self-indulgent and perhaps daunting by the amount of material but I hope it's found to be consistently interesting and rewarding in the end.

DOWNLOAD:
THE LYGATH TREE (VOL. I)
THE LYGATH TREE (VOL. II)

THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is the title of a novella by H.P. Lovecraft completed in 1927 but published posthumously in 1943, a few years after Lovecraft's death. Apparently, the book is the longest of many stories to feature his protagonist Randolph Carter and is considered part of his Dream Cycle series. I have yet to read the novella but I have a copy and was looking at it a few months ago and found myself drawn to the title and the titles of the chapters. I have read some Lovecraft and enjoy his work but I have mostly liked the titles to his work, perhaps sometimes a bit more than the content. This particular novella inspired my LP's title and the track names as well but that is essentially where the inspiration ends. Not having read the book, I did not intend to evoke the story or any imagery in the actual content but rather interpreted the titles into songs based only on my impression of the titles themselves. So each track shares the same name of each chapter and some songs have a dark tone that could arguably evoke the sense of horror or dread typical of Lovecraft's work but otherwise the style of the album is probably less nightmarish than you might expect of music inspired by Lovecraft. Overall, the sound employs the ambient psychedelia and drone usually found in my work but each track feels quite different from one song to the next. The title track is a sprawling psych mammoth that flows through various slabs of drone and slowly thudding drums. Another track, "The Silver Key," is a heavily percussive piece with various layers of tribal drums, with a drone that melts into the next track "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", which sounds like freak folk with layered nonsensical vocals and delayed acoustic guitars. Meanwhile, "The White Ship" is a fuzzy '60s garage rocker with my attempt at an acid-fried guitar solo (sorta). As it may seem, the appeal of the titles lied in not only their horror genre nature but also the mystical and psychedelic quality of the words themselves, dreamy evocations not uncommon in Lovecraft's work.

DOWNLOAD:
THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH