En - City of Brides

Pitchfork 74

In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder—a little glimmer of light from the depths of a well. A co-president of the beloved, minimalist-focused Root Strata label, Croy devotes much of his time to building a sophisticated, wonderfully weird roster of artists (Grouper, the Alps, and Driphouse have all issued LPs on the label): but he's also earned a reputation as a gifted electroacoustic auteur. Devane, meanwhile, comes from a guitar background, tempered by a love for the digital greats (as his acoustic cover of Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" attests). The duo’s latest, City of Brides, is their most cohesive—and perhaps paradoxically, sonically varied—statement to date.

Establishing a sense of momentum when nothing moves is one of the biggest challenges in drone music. On City of Brides, Croy and Devane supply propulsion through juxtaposition: not just between the organic and the artificial, but also between the serious and the playful. For every period of restraint—the two-part, vaguely erotic shadow play of "Songs for Diminished Lovemaking", for instance—there’s a burst of playfulness to balance it. On the buoyant "Mendocino Nature Rave", the duo ventriloquize their motherboards to reproduce the sounds of dolphins, bats, and other wildlife, while "Hall of Mirrors" sounds like a thrilling, grim game of Peek-A-Boo, constantly threatened by melodramatic synth swoops.

There are no samples to speak of on City of Brides; every sound we hear is built from scratch. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. "Blonde Is Back" is the most magnificent, its warm swathes of synths simultaneously soothing and suffocating. The experience of listening to it isn’t that far off from being smothered by a fleece blanket.

The diversity of the instruments here helps distinguish City of Brides from peers like Pete Swanson and Oren Ambarchi, or influencers like La Monte Young. On "Mark of the Slav", En use a koto to create a foggy soundscape before drifting out into the horizon. In addition to honoring its reputation for graceful precision, En challenge the koto’s inherent solemnity by way of energetic arrangements that render it assertive, even abrasive; its shattered-glass-strums break the reverent murmur of "Secret Samba". Indeed, one could make a strong case for Croy’s playing as City of Brides’ secret weapon: a valuable source of energy on an extensive, occasionally exhausting album.

If you’re not a fan of drone, City of Brides probably won’t turn you into an acolyte. The LP gets off to a sluggish, vaguely narcotic start with "Blades" and "Dead Ringer", two relatively straightforward ambient pieces that lack the standout quirks of later tracks. Those looking for a more leaden approach may walk away disappointed as well; Devane’s guitars never reach the intensity of, say, Sunn O))). Nevertheless, there are plenty of secrets refracted through City of Brides' glassine spaces—and peering through such a globally-inspired prism is arguably as compelling as any seismic axe riff.