Loscil - Equivalents

A Closer Listen

Many people say that listening to ambient music reminds them of cloudgazing, but few artists are as intentional about making the connection as Loscil.  Scott Morgan’s 12th album under this moniker takes inspiration from a series of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz that shares its name.  Equivalents has been showcased at MoMA and collected in book form; after nearly a century, it continues to beguile.  This means that Equivalents (the album) is not music for looking at clouds, but music for looking at a person looking at clouds.  Stieglitz’ work is an entry point and a lens.

220 in all, these photographs represent some of the earliest use of the camera to capture abstraction: an approach undervalued at the time.  An amusing conversation is noted by Dorothy Norman:

Man (looking at a Stieglitz Equivalent): Is this a photograph of water? Stieglitz: What difference does it make of what it is a photograph? Man: But is it a photograph of water? Stieglitz: I tell you it does not matter. Man: Well, then, is it a picture of the sky? Stieglitz: It happens to be a picture of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance.

Substitute “song” for “photograph” and we have a conversation about ambient music.  In terms of framing, there is some significance to the cloud connection.  But in terms of listening, the details are less significant; some might say irrelevant.  What do we picture when we hear Loscil’s music?  What do we think or feel?  Do we fail the cloud when we don’t even decide what it might look like, but simply enjoy the sight?  Might it produce a feeling of magnificence, or remind us of ephemeral beauty?

The same questions hold true for ambient music in general, but this album in particular.  The album may produce specific impressions: a rotor blade coming to a halt, a gentle mist, a mammatus cloud.  If I were to tell you which tracks produced such images in my mind, I might handicap your imagination, in the same way as a horse pointed out in a cloud continues to look like a horse to a person who hears the comparison.  Instead I can report that the album produces a feeling of awe, especially when the ambience turns to drone and the volume rises (the end of “Equivalent 5”).  But in its quieter moments, especially those with piano (“Equivalent 3”), it inspires peace.  The listening experience creates the same range of effects as cloudgazing, from wisps to gray shadows, stopping just short of showers ~ except perhaps the implied sheets of “Equivalents 2.”

Ironically, Stieglitz’ photographs and Loscil’s tracks have form, although they imply the shifting of form.  Each is abstract, yet captured.  Loscil’s aural mirrors pull apart like taffy and merge like fronts, but remain within the boundaries of their recordings as Stieglitz’s photographs remain within their frames.  Perhaps only generative music can capture the ongoing nature of weather systems, in the same way as a window can expand the work of a photograph.  But instinctively, we know that such substitutions are inadequate.  Artists spark the imagination, showing more by showing less: a picture worth a thousand words, and (to paraphrase Blake) a world in a grain of sound.  (Richard Allen)

Mon Aug 05 00:01:23 GMT 2019

Pitchfork 70

Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’ black-and-white photographs of clouds, the Canadian ambient musician reworks piano samples into one of the most monochromatic albums of his career.

Fri Aug 16 05:00:00 GMT 2019

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

Loscil
Equivalents

[Kranky; 2019]

Rating: 3/5

Steadily active since 2001, Vancouver musician (and VG sound director) Scott Morgan’s Loscil project has given us one immaculate ambient album after another. Although it still sounds amazing (“Emma” in particular remains a potent, solace-instilling slice of brain raki), First Narrows and its skittering dub have since nearly folded into a templated sort of bed/study music role. But so has Eno’s ambient work. Both artists make albums that are somewhat utilitarian in a fashion that befits their chosen genre. Loscil albums do get denser and less overtly melodic as they go, but they are always a sturdy source of calm (with space for muted wonderment) when needed. The differentiation as Morgan has gone along is subtle enough that this reliable relaxation/sleep aid aspect could potentially overshadow what is an immersive, diffuse micro-thicket of wide-eyed synaptic charge.

The arc of Loscil’s recorded material is not dissimilar to the slow-eroding procession of The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the end of time. “Warm” may be an operative word for the first three albums, but the project has never been exactly blissful. The music is more reflective of a swelling hum of massive, focused industry. Its tickling pops and tactile clicks contentedly skim along fathomless oceans of pulsing, drifting drone. This warmth begins to seep out on 2006’s Plume, where those percussive pips start to retain a soft menace, like a faded, dusty daylight rendering of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score. In addition to showing the aforementioned monstrous industry for its actual monstrousness, Plume’s lone billowing smokestack cover marks a notable aesthetic shift from the electronica 101 presentation of the preceding three. This gloom descent resumed on the rain-streaked Endless Falls, where all manner of machinations great and small got subsumed in the gloaming. Even with the slight return of 2012’s Sketches from New Brighton, this sense of vast, uncertain space crept in and never left, while Morgan’s command of alluringly transportive atmosphere has never flagged. When present, Loscil has blended live instrumentation in a seamless way that never takes it out of its textural spell into something too placid or soundtrack-y (that said, Morgan’s work has been both composed for and featured in TV and film for years, most recently alongside Markus Fjellstrom’s striking soundtrack for The Terror).

Equivalent 6 from loscil on Vimeo.

Equivalents is similar to a lot of the post-Coast/Range/Arc material, but decidedly reduced. The faint stuttering high organ sounds that pepper the opener feel curiously threadbare, with none of that contented percussive effervescence swimming up to give it any harmonic sweep. In this light, the album’s a bit of a carryover from his ghost ship-inspired 2015 app Adrift, which used “structured random selection” to produce infinite variations on each infinite play. As on the material in the app, this music evokes a low, keening desolation. It evokes a perpetually lost seabird or a lone crab clinging to a buoy. The album frames this oceanic vastness as an ungraspable oblivion rather than as something with unlimited potential, though the learned aching passion of seeking ever gnaws at the listener’s periphery. Like the Alfred Stieglitz photographs that inspired it, the tracks on Equivalents are vaguely pastoral, yet opaque enough to allow for a more intrinsic engagement with its trace elements. The dreary temperament that often prevails is too essential to be draining. It is one that recognizes not only grim inevitabilities, but also that there is not few enough reasons for them to provide a clear course. A hard-won frustration that sees myriad potential patterns of delusion and procrastination, realizing that it is sound in and of itself, rather than something to be dispelled.

If that sounds like “wallowing” gussied up, well, I guess that notion could also could also serve as a pithy sell for this music. One could also go with “pining,” “portrait as still life,” or maybe “molasses ekg.” But the truth is that there is a great deal of intrigue to this album. For being one of the shorter entries, “Equivalent 5” has a breathtaking incremental suspense to it. The sub bass here and throughout is impeccably infused, sneaking up on you like a head rush. Speaking to the virtue of a work that mines the elusive midpoint between wallowing and moving purposefully through one’s dimension as is, Equivalents is a prime example. To borrow a bit from his second album’s title, “submerged” seems the better brevity with which to regard what Loscil excels at. Your underwater temperament may be one of serenity, but your finite compatibility with the environment sounds faint but insistent alarms. The closing “Equivalent 4” is the only track here to feature the aforementioned percussive style, but rather than an incorporation of that oeuvre touchstone, it gives the track’s steady pulsing a sense of calmly insistent urgency. So when we ultimately come to the surface, it’s not necessarily a rude awakening. Listeners get lost in Loscil’s world, sure. But one can find much of themselves there as well.

Tue Sep 03 04:04:02 GMT 2019

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

Loscil
Equivalents

[Kranky; 2019]

Rating: 3/5

Steadily active since 2001, Vancouver musician (and VG sound director) Scott Morgan’s Loscil project has given us one immaculate ambient album after another. Although it still sounds amazing (“Emma” in particular remains a potent, solace-instilling slice of brain raki), First Narrows and its skittering dub have since nearly folded into a templated sort of bed/study music role. But so has Eno’s ambient work. Both artists make albums that are somewhat utilitarian in a fashion that befits their chosen genre. Loscil albums do get denser and less overtly melodic as they go, but they are always a sturdy source of calm (with space for muted wonderment) when needed. The differentiation as Morgan has gone along is subtle enough that this reliable relaxation/sleep aid aspect could potentially overshadow what is an immersive, diffuse micro-thicket of wide-eyed synaptic charge.

The arc of Loscil’s recorded material is not dissimilar to the slow-eroding procession of The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the end of time. “Warm” may be an operative word for the first three albums, but the project has never been exactly blissful. The music is more reflective of a swelling hum of massive, focused industry. Its tickling pops and tactile clicks contentedly skim along fathomless oceans of pulsing, drifting drone. This warmth begins to seep out on 2006’s Plume, where those percussive pips start to retain a soft menace, like a faded, dusty daylight rendering of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score. In addition to showing the aforementioned monstrous industry for its actual monstrousness, Plume’s lone billowing smokestack cover marks a notable aesthetic shift from the electronica 101 presentation of the preceding three. This gloom descent resumed on the rain-streaked Endless Falls, where all manner of machinations great and small got subsumed in the gloaming. Even with the slight return of 2012’s Sketches from New Brighton, this sense of vast, uncertain space crept in and never left, while Morgan’s command of alluringly transportive atmosphere has never flagged. When present, Loscil has blended live instrumentation in a seamless way that never takes it out of its textural spell into something too placid or soundtrack-y (that said, Morgan’s work has been both composed for and featured in TV and film for years, most recently alongside Markus Fjellstrom’s striking soundtrack for The Terror).

Equivalent 6 from loscil on Vimeo.

Equivalents is similar to a lot of the post-Coast/Range/Arc material, but decidedly reduced. The faint stuttering high organ sounds that pepper the opener feel curiously threadbare, with none of that contented percussive effervescence swimming up to give it any harmonic sweep. In this light, the album’s a bit of a carryover from his ghost ship-inspired 2015 app Adrift, which used “structured random selection” to produce infinite variations on each infinite play. As on the material in the app, this music evokes a low, keening desolation. It evokes a perpetually lost seabird or a lone crab clinging to a buoy. The album frames this oceanic vastness as an ungraspable oblivion rather than as something with unlimited potential, though the learned aching passion of seeking ever gnaws at the listener’s periphery. Like the Alfred Stieglitz photographs that inspired it, the tracks on Equivalents are vaguely pastoral, yet opaque enough to allow for a more intrinsic engagement with its trace elements. The dreary temperament that often prevails is too essential to be draining. It is one that recognizes not only grim inevitabilities, but also that there is not few enough reasons for them to provide a clear course. A hard-won frustration that sees myriad potential patterns of delusion and procrastination, realizing that it is sound in and of itself, rather than something to be dispelled.

If that sounds like “wallowing” gussied up, well, I guess that notion could also could also serve as a pithy sell for this music. One could also go with “pining,” “portrait as still life,” or maybe “molasses ekg.” But the truth is that there is a great deal of intrigue to this album. For being one of the shorter entries, “Equivalent 5” has a breathtaking incremental suspense to it. The sub bass here and throughout is impeccably infused, sneaking up on you like a head rush. Speaking to the virtue of a work that mines the elusive midpoint between wallowing and moving purposefully through one’s dimension as is, Equivalents is a prime example. To borrow a bit from his second album’s title, “submerged” seems the better brevity with which to regard what Loscil excels at. Your underwater temperament may be one of serenity, but your finite compatibility with the environment sounds faint but insistent alarms. The closing “Equivalent 4” is the only track here to feature the aforementioned percussive style, but rather than an incorporation of that oeuvre touchstone, it gives the track’s steady pulsing a sense of calmly insistent urgency. So when we ultimately come to the surface, it’s not necessarily a rude awakening. Listeners get lost in Loscil’s world, sure. But one can find much of themselves there as well.

Tue Sep 03 04:04:02 GMT 2019