Dark ambient music is particularly effective at evoking strange, surreal, subjective visions. Synthetic tones and natural field recordings, swathed in echo and cavernous reverb, are stripped of context, and freed from the brutal confines of Western tonality. It borrows a lot from cinematic sound design, particularly of a horror/sci-fi nature, but it’s untethered to visuals to concretize it, and tie it to down to a particular meaning. Strange movies, particular to each listener, play out between yr eustachian canals, behind eyelids, in yr dreams, in thin air.
Fluttercage, the inaugural LP from Isobel Ccircle~ on the essential Exotic Pylon label, manages to be genuinely unsettling with its soundworlds. There is a sense of creeping menace, of something lurking out there in thick fog, just beyond the range of sight, in Isobel Ccircle’s misty enclaves. Isobel Ccircle~ is a collaboration between April Larson, fresh from her excellent The Second Throne release, and Matt Bower from The Revenant Sea and Wizards Tells Lies. Between the two of them, they have cited influences as diverse as Tom Waits and Pan Sonic. But Fluttercage sounds nothing like their influences, or much like their solo projects for that matter.
The album starts off innocuously enough, with “Switch” and a nearly-friendly and -recognizable music box toy piano melody, but that is quickly swallowed by hissing static and ominous bass drones. From there, the album is free of nearly any familiar and comforting signifiers, and you wander about, alone and lost in the mist. This is the sound of being alone in nature, seeking other worlds, seeking visions. This is what it might sound like as Laura heads off, a-huntin’ little men, seeking forbidden fruits at The Goblin Market. This is what it might sound like when Lucian Taylor fell asleep in the Roman ruins, beyond The Hill Of Dreams. This is what it might sound like when The Signal-man lies awake and alone in the night, waiting for the clangorous bells. Waiting for ruin.Most of Fluttercage is built around sustained electronic tones and rumbling, scraping, analog surface noise – like a tape recorder crashing through the woods. The layering of tones and different kinds of media is what’s so striking about Isobel Ccircle~, and how it is combined to create a cohesive realm. More than anybody else, I’d like to know who does what, what are they doing to their audio to create this uneasy listening? Because Fluttercage is more subtle and creeping in its toneology, it blends in with the air around it, with the incidental sounds of yr environment, and transforms yr listening space into a twilight faerie realm, where dread mysteries lie. There is wonder, and also terror.
The liner notes, penned by Joseph Stannard from The Outer Church, give an insight into what you’re getting into. Short, cryptic microfiction, about telltale scissors and listening through the floorboards of yr apartment building in the dead of night as metallic spheres bulge from the walls. Isobel Ccircle~ is a place – a Twilight Zone in the ether between Bower and Larson. Isobel Ccircle~ is also a person, and it is easy to imagine her as some dark and solitary witch, playing in ruins and dark rivers. She is not afraid of moonless clearings. She will teach you the ways of the earth, prying back stones to show you slugs and precious gems. She smells like moss and sandalwood. There is a dangerous glint in her eye that is almost irresistible.Major props to Johnny Mugwump and Exotic Pylon for putting out this longform slow classical drift — for infecting the world with strange, beautiful and terrible visions. This kind of staticky drone is not really in fashion right now, unless it comes from Leyland Kirby or William Basinski, who everybody’s already on board with. I, for one, would like to see a resurgence. This kind of detailed, layered composition will go a long way towards seeing that done. There is major attention being paid — this is not the sound of software talking to itself. If anybody reading this has gotten anything out of Ben Frost‘s recent masterpiece A U R O R A, you will love this record.
Fluttercage is an undertaking. It’s dense. It’s long. There’s almost no melodies. It questions the idea of what music is. It’s like a Bergman flick, or Tarkovsky, and, like them, they challenge the modern attention deficit. But for those that like to listen and think, to go for long walks, who are looking for mysteries, there is much to learn here.I have to go now. Isobel is waiting.
-J Simpson-
