Loscil - Monument Builders

Drowned In Sound 80

In truth, Mr. Morgan—old hand of the electronic-ambient vanguard—has explicitly named the artefacts that most informed his writing process. Among them: a VHS copy of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, a film about our species’ inability to function outside of the parameters of our own technologies. Soundtracked by Philip Glass, its sung texts include the Hopi prophecy: “if we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster”. Morgan’s copy had degraded over time, so that the footage warbled and fluttered and failed. Elsewhere: Edward Burtynsky’s aerial photographs of environmental decay and wholesale ecological destruction. Tyre heaps, scrap piles, industry run amok. Finally: the writings of anti-humanist philosopher John Gray, with whose tome Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals he was in particularly dark accordance. 'It reinforced a bleak notion', explains Morgan, 'that we humans don’t have much say in how it all turns out'.

Monument Builders sees our world for all its devastation. But the most startling thing about it is Morgan’s knack for depicting it all: so obviously are these the sonics of decline. ‘Drained Lake’ finds menace in its mechanical glitches and clammy synths, its sense of space such that you can almost feel dust in the air. The relentless arpeggiated bass-line of ‘Red Tide’ nods most clearly in Glass’s direction, but the sheen and the shine of the minimalist's rhythms have shed their skin to reveal something altogether less optimistic. Throughout the record we encounter the distant sound of brass instruments: lonely, embittered lamentations played on horns and trumpets. ‘Straw Dogs’, for example, like Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes at half-mast: once visceral, now withered. At the record’s close, ‘Weeds’ fades off into the night, computerised voices shivering in the cold.

With his eleventh release, it becomes clearer than ever that Loscil is a near-perfect avatar for the confluence of man and machine. Playing live, he is static behind a table of knobs and switches: simply a machine operator, not a human fount of artistic vision. His reference points are bleak, but then so is the view from his window, whether that be one of burnt sand or pixel array. Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross are sensible points of reference, but in truth Monument Builders confronts, with little in the way of concession, an unholy congruence of man, machine and environment on completely its own terms. Some of Loscil’s best, most menacing, most uncompromising work.

Pitchfork 74

Scott Morgan’s trajectory as Loscil, the moniker under which he produces his solo work, seems more befitting of a biologist than an ambient music veteran. Over the past sixteen years, Morgan has shaped his electronic sound around subjects like subatomic particles (Triple Point), shadowy ocean depths (Submers), shore life (First Narrows), and the traits of airborne substances (Plume). Even the intention behind his free-flowing arrangements is scientific, as Morgan has often acknowledged his aim to recreate the properties of water in music. But where his previous albums have aspired, almost methodically, to map the movement and texture of wave energy, Monument Builders, Morgan’s eleventh album, maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces.

Extending the notions of community that were brought to a head on his recent EP for Greta—a charity album to raise money for a friend's child diagnosed with bone cancer—Morgan now charts the progression of life from the arid wasteland of “Drained Lake” to the first tiny sprouts of growth in “Weeds.” Monument Builders is a highly visual album, a mosaic of images depicting construction, erasure, devastation, redemption, and transformation. The sounds of micro-cassette recorders, decrepit samples, and grinding chains of percussion evoke a strong sense of place, the same way fuzz on a vintage videotape evokes age. “Red Tide,” with its layered percussive onslaught and brass like steaming train whistles, announces the rising of the sea, just as the cascading pianos of “Deceiver” very nearly resembles rain falling after a thunderstorm.

As is typical in his work, Morgan uses the first four songs of the album to mount tension. Darkness lingers in the title track, which builds around a single quivering note. The anticipation culminates in “Straw Dogs,” a menacing track with screeching horns, named in honor of anti-humanist philosopher John Gray’s book of the same name, which speaks to the dangers of placing humanity at the center of the universe. The ominous edge behind the compositions would seem to indicate that Morgan subscribes to Gray’s ideas about our own propensity for geological and social destruction. But the album’s three remaining songs suggest something slightly more optimistic.

“Deceiver,” with its weepy, penitent piano, eventually gives way to a high-pitch wailing that expresses acute feelings of grief. Gray’s philosophy seems to appear again in “Anthropocene”—the name for our current geological epoch, marked by harmful human centrality—and the song’s pulsating, intense bass line drives our guilt and grief through moments of self-reflection, mourning, and change. By the time we arrive at “Weeds,” the album’s final song, we are ready to confront punishment. Only we discover, from a murmur-like flicker of synth notes, that what awaits us are the sounds of human voices crying out from the dark. Among our distress and destruction, Morgan concludes, hopefully, that life persists.

In this way, Monument Builders is oddly reminiscent of “Directive,” one of Robert Frost’s last poems, which also advances ideas of survival and endurance. Much like with Builders, in “Directive” we follow a guide through a place of decay and dissolution. At the end of our journey, our guide says to us, “Here are your waters and your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” Scott Morgan has made a career of showing us waters and watering places. With Monument Builders, we are finally invited to drink.