This is a welcome repress for loscil‘s 2011 album coast/range/arc//. Inspired by the geography of the Cascadian Mountains, it was originally released on the aptly named Glacial Pace and was very much at home there, but the sort of slow motion grandeur in which the album revels definitely fits in with the Kranky aesthetic.
The dramatic artwork showing ice capped mountain ranges and vast lakes is very much in keeping with the sounds produced here, as over the course of seven slowly developing, carefully oscillating pieces, we are transported far from the comfort of home and into the vast, stunning expanses of frozen tundra and distant peaks.
The drones used here are speaker-rattling if the volume is high, and they can certainly push you out of the cocoon of a lot of ambient tracks. The textures used in addition to the main drones are all enough to furnish each piece with its own atmosphere and sense of epic timelessness; but there is often a rumbling undertow that demands the listener’s attention rather than allowing the pieces to float in the background.At times those undertows feel like distant bad weather moving slowly across frozen landscapes or hint at natural springs bubbling up from underground. Whichever way, these extra textures allow for some depth to the pieces that push them out of the contemporary and into some timeless topography, ancient and gnarled, relentless and massive.
They could be good soundtracks to slow-motion helicopter rides or slowly panning panoramas, the breath of the camera operator freezing as pebbles are dislodged and tumble into vast chasms, empty of people for thousands of years. It is that feeling of dehumanisation that is at work here, and these pieces and the vistas that they describe are too huge for paltry human interaction. The sites lovingly painted in this album will still be here when humanity is no more and they are impressive enough to soundtrack that feeling. There are human touches — or at least reminders that a human was involved here — such as the cathedral organ drone of “Stave Peak” and the sweeping searchlights still hint at remoteness, even though they sound familiar. The relentlessness does border on oppression at times and the subterranean metal dragging of “Névé” could feel like being torn apart by icy winds if you turned the volume up high enough, but it is the isolated beauty and grandeur of the pieces that strikes you most; that sense of seeing something for the first time, something that has stood resolute and unchanging for millennia, monolithic and glorious.coast/range/arc// is an album of vast, icy beauty and great to see back on the shelves again.
-Mr Olivetti-
