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)