Loscil – Lake Fire

Kranky

Lake Fire is Loscil‘s first solo outing for Kranky since 2021’s Clara and once again finds him in reflective mood, with the genesis of the album coming from recent wildfires experienced whilst on a road trip.

This experience took him back to an aborted suite which was reshaped and recast as this series of drifting monochrome vignettes, with Scott Morgan playing everything except for cello on one track. To a certain extent you know what to expect from a Loscil album, but somehow each outing is very different from the previous, the imagery specific to a set of ideas.

Opener “Arrhythmia”, with its cavernous resounding echoes, comes over like a dub experiment slowed down to glacial proportions. The throb of an engine and the clang of distant machinery are massive and insistent; but the tone changes as the track progresses, as if giving differing perspectives on a landscape in the way land changes as you move along a coastline. There is a lot of haze in this album that plays over circling rhythms. You can imagine watching the smoke drift across the water from the vantage point of a vessel, experiencing the destruction first hand, but perfectly removed.

Lake Fire is made from shades of grey, with pale tones of distant peaks and the washed-out blue-green of water, everything shrouded from clear sight and the circling repetition of the synth lines gives enough variance to alleviate the overwhelming sense of drift. The variety of the drone elements as the album progresses is impressive, these tones painting a different backdrop for each track, scattered piano notes on “Candling” dropping like a brief summer shower, tranquillity underpinned with its whimsical harpsichord effect.

“Silos” comes on like a slow-motion helicopter ride through threaded mist, but the introduction of some cracked beats, organ and horn tones lifts the view up substantially; whereas “Ash Clouds”, the one track left from the original premise with James Meager‘s double bass drones, is like that scene from Apocalypse Now where the gunboat is gliding along the river through wreathes of smoke; the tension is palpable, with the long duration and slow decline giving it natural progress through an unfamiliar landscape.

The reverb shimmer of “Flutter” puts heat in the air and the sounds are smeared against a tranquil piano motif. The piano hints at hidden depths, while the bass tones of “Doux” would really rattle the walls if given the right system. The concluding title track really has an air of finality as a deep breathing effect has us underwater, a last opportunity to escape before inundation.

There is something so right about the conclusion and the sentiments that Scott must have felt in an attempt to describe such devastation have been painted beautifully with this selection of tracks.

-Mr Olivetti-