New Nihilism
Jarosław Leśkiewicz‘s (AKA Naked On My Own) first CD as Opollo delivers ten tracks of wool-gathering shoegaze ambience which pulse, glide and drone at the listener, prompting the attainment of theta wave-heavy states of consciousness, or perhaps more simply nudging them towards a kind of wakeful sleep state.
As with the best of this kind of thing (Leśkiewicz is obviously a fan of both
Brian Eno and
Justin Broadrick in his smothering modes as
Lull,
Final et al, as well as
Main),
Stone Tapes – a title that could equally be a nod towards both the theory that ghosts are spirits encoded into places and to the British TV play of that name from the 1970s whose radiophonic soundtrack has long been the stuff of lo-fi electronic legend and inspiration – seizes control of the audio spectrum,
softly overpowering all other audio sensation and folding it within a blanket as complete in its re-contextualisation of the soundscape as snow is for the land.
To say that nothing much happens, but happens over a long time and with variations in its nothingess is as glibly Zen an observation as might be expected of the profoundly befuddling progression which Leśkiewicz unfurls, but maybe that’s the point. This is not music for action, nor even for those far-too frantic and confounding airports; perhaps for train journeys, where the onward rush
holds the world outside to be a series of gradually evolving, always changing tableaux whose interior detail can never be quite grasped by the observer, no matter how many times they might take the same line.
Stone Tapes has the sound of loops and FX pedals in excelsis, though rarely in excess, that the ’90s (so-called) isolationists adored. It is at once all nuance and totality, the end result manifesting at points quite far from the beginning while remaining essentially the same. Leśkiewicz’s control is admirable throughout, gently shifting and propelling rather than building into anything overly cacophonous – even if one track is called “Eruption” and another “Starburst”. Where there are peaks, they are ruggedly mountainous, windswept and elevated rather than rising up in barrages; there is no obvious place for seismic brutality here, but instead for an environmental beauty which revels as much in the stochastic patterns of falling rain as it does in the rise and fall of the tides and the geological drift of continents.
-Antron S Meister-
Jarosław Leśkiewicz‘s (AKA Naked On My Own) first CD as Opollo delivers ten tracks of wool-gathering shoegaze ambience which pulse, glide and drone at the listener, prompting the attainment of theta wave-heavy states of consciousness, or perhaps more simply nudging them towards a kind of wakeful sleep state.
