Imagine, if you will — you are driving through a vast flat featureless landscape. It is snowing so hard you can barely see, spirals of snow and frost whorling on your windshield. The ground undulates, ever so slightly, the rise-and-fall the only hint of motion, of any life at all. The swells come together, faster and faster, higher and higher, until the frost-bitten landscape becomes like a turbulent sea in slow motion. You rise, you fall, yet nothing ever changes…
ELEH is the prolific hyper-minimalist drone project of John Brien Jr, issuing nearly fifty albums of square-wave worship since 2006, largely on Important Records. He creates particularly extreme minimalist drone, more akin to extreme longform dark ambient like Dirty Knobs or Robert Rich‘s sleep concerts than anything you’re likely to hear in a rave chillout room. ELEH truly stands at the crossroads of drone, inheriting the mystical mantle from La Monte Young‘s recordings with Pandit Pran Nath, which is then fused with modern modular synth zones.
Snoweight is made up of two side-long drones, clocking in at around eighteen minutes each. The album was recorded during two days of pounding, crushing, claustrophobic snowstorms, which Brien managed to capture and transform with his signature synth rig. In this instance, ELEH and his synths act as the stylus, etching the moment into the vinyl of eternity. As is always the case when you’re dealing with such extreme minimalism, every sound counts, much more so than it might in busier compositions. This is the realm where ELEH really shines, as his pulsing synth pads are unrival-ed — warm, hypnotic and mesmerising in one moment, and overwhelming and obliterating, the next. Side 1 is especially sparse, being made up almost entirely of a sustained low-end drone. The emptiness lets you linger on each detail — sine waves spun out like saltwater taffy, which begins to ripple and shift like hills in a featureless landscape.Side 2 is almost busy, by comparison. Side 1’s bass drones are joined by ringing glass harmonics. At times, there’s almost a melody even… made as impactful as foundry hammers given the blank slate vacuity of most of Snoweight. The end result ends up being something like experiencing hallucinations as you wait to succumb to exposure in some desolate wintry landscapes. If you’ve ever wanted to know what Jack Torrance or MacReady saw in their final moments, here’s your chance.
Snoweight is out now from Important Records on white and black vinyl, cassette, CD and digital.
-J Simpson-
