John Sellekaers‘ latest Feral Cities album is a series of drone-based soundscapes that fit well with the brooding but slightly abstracted cover image. There is a sense of solitude that runs through Arcs And Layers, but the sort of solitude that is bracing and life-affirming.
The jittery opening to “White Heat” echoes around your head as the unstable bass looks for a way of settling down. It is a strangely panicky start; but as the descending drone is introduced, so the mood starts to calm and gradually things even out — but it is not a straightforward ride.
As John says in the press release, the sounds were “stretched, compressed, reversed” and it shows in the uneven, rather disorientating pulse of the first few tracks. “All Things” has that feel of leaning your head against a warm train window and watching as the sunlight dapples through trees and plays brightly across your eyes, leaving you a little giddy; while there is a touch of the fairground about “Interiors”; but as if things were moving around you at different speeds, lulling and repelling in equal measure. As the album progresses, the pieces tend to clear themselves, as if the air has become cleaner, the atmosphere rarefied. You can see for miles across the expanse of “Clay Mountain” and in “Our Gardens”, it feels like wind blowing through inaccessible mountain passes on some journey towards enlightenment. The noises used across Arcs And Layers are a mix of the familiar and the unexpected, and at points, it is hard to work out what they might have been. In fact, the drone that roars through “Unplaced” like a cross between an aircraft taking off and a church organ with its diminishing pattern lends some warmth to the proceedings.The album ends with the perfectly restful “Shimmer & Grids”, its subterranean atmosphere a welcoming cocoon from the travails of the day to day. The album as a whole is a really varied series of little journeys and adventures in the intricacies of sound, and a welcome addition to John’s burgeoning catalogue.
-Mr Olivetti-
