When One Sound Effect is One Too Many

The first few seconds of “Uta,” the opening track on Shinobu Nemoto’s album Bird Requiem, paint a gorgeous landscape of desertion. Using what he calls “analog vibrations,” Nemoto wastes no time creating a mood, but just as quickly, the listener realizes this is essentially the only mood that the album has room for. By definition, drone music doesn’t deviate much from minute to minute, track to track within an album. But Nemoto takes things a step further, restricting his music to nothing more than the raw analog effect that opens the album. It’s a lovely sound, but the record’s seven tracks can’t be enjoyed together without a healthy dose of patience and tolerance.

Nemoto’s sound is reminiscent of William Basinski’s brilliant and increasingly popular Disintegration Loops series, in which simple piano and string loops recorded decades prior were dusted off and played back, literally losing their structure as tape fragments chipped away during playback. The resulting sound blends the loops in their original, “alive” form with the oxidized, slowly dying loops, which make an inevitable entrance toward the end of each piece. Spanning four albums, the Disintegration Loops is a massive project to absorb, however lovely. That said, it sets itself apart from Nemoto’s work under the Summons of Shining Ruins moniker due to the fact that each Basinski loop isn’t in a state of constant decay. Literally, the listener hears the music fall apart from its stable beginnings.

Saturating an entire album with one sound effect like Nemoto does removes any potency the effect has in the first place. It’s no longer the basis for a beautiful album opener or a brief interlude; instead, it occupies the entire work, which as a result has little room to breathe. The clearest example of how an album can be hampered by one all-encompasing sound effect is Dave Portner and Kria Brekkan’s 2007 collaborative album Pullhair Rubeye.

Both Portner and Brekkan are accomplished and respected musicians, Portner gaining fame as Animal Collective’s lead singer and Brekkan doing the same for Mum, one of Iceland’s most internationally renowned bands through the release of its final album in 2009. According to legend, after Portner and Brekkan finished recording but before the album was mixed, a night of David Lynch and … chemicals … led them to play the entire album in reverse. They were pleased enough with the result to release it in that form, which made for an album strikingly similar to Bird Requiem — beautiful for a few moments (even a few songs), but no longer than that.

Nemoto really has found something with his ability to create a decay effect without the help of a single computer — an impressive feat in this digital age. But laying off the decay a bit — or throwing in a complementary effect here and there — would do a world of good.

eluvium’s similes: thoughts after one listen

Eluvium’s fifth full-length LP is pretty. That may appear to be a compliment at first, but my impression of the album — released two days ago — after one listen is one of slight disappointment. Similes hit stores with its share of hype, mostly touted as a successful transition of sorts for Matthew Cooper, who to this point had kept his voice away from the microphone and written multi-layered songs without a formal structure, to great effect. This time, Cooper retains the familiar style for only a few of the record’s eight songs, introducing vocals and somewhat of a pop song structure to more than half of the pieces. The new style sounds nice — and pretty — but it seems clear that to a degree, Cooper has abandoned his greatest strength with this album.

This isn’t to say that experimenting with a new musical style after a number of years isn’t critical to a musician’s remaining relevant and inspired — look no further than the Beatles — but making “songs” instead of improvised “pieces” is usually the territory of musicians outside the drone/ambient/noise bubble. This has nothing to do with track length — possibly my favorite album Cooper has put out is his Miniatures LP, a little-known vinyl-only release under his given name made up of nine relatively short, simple tracks. On that album — and Copia, another favorite — Cooper devotes all of his attention to the “sound” of the tracks — what’s heard two rooms away, muffled by a few walls and background clatter. With Similes, it seems that Cooper’s new style — while a noble risk — is compromising the freedom he took advantage of so beautifully on past albums. “Calm of the Cast-Light Cloud,” a thick and unapologetic five-minute drone from his Talk Amongst The Trees LP is gorgeous, and it would’ve been out of place on Similes, interrupting the clinical process set about by the more measured, structured tracks.

Still, Similes does feature a handful of nods to Cooper’s best work, like “Nightmare 5,” a haunting instrumental piece that sounds much like its title, and “Bending Dream,” which is what the underappreciated music of Julianna Barwick would resemble if translated to the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Closer “Cease to Know” makes great use of cyclical electronic howls for more than eight minutes, but only after Cooper’s voice makes a hesitant and brief appearance.

When any vocals — especially Cooper’s, which deviate little within and between these songs — are set to this type of music, it changes the complexion of an album entirely. Whereas an instrumental piece lets the listener find his own world to set the music to, lyric-based music is more grounded and mundane — which is fine. It just may not be an ideal match for music of this style.