loscil, “Lake Fire”
Scott Morgan has been quietly and steadily releasing beautifully crafted and fog-veiled grayscale ambient-dub excursions for over a quarter century now so I was not expecting a huge creative leap forward this deep into the game, but Lake Fire may very well be the strongest loscil album of his career. Morgan’s breakthrough doesn’t sound like it came easily though, as this album was assembled from the reworked ruins of an aborted suite for electronics and ensemble (though one brooding and blackened piece from that suite (“Ash Clouds”) did manage to survive the culling). Notably, literal ash clouds were quite a significant inspiration this time around, as Lake Fire is something of an impressionistic road trip diary from a drive through the mountains of British Columbia while sky-blackening wildfires raged in the distance. In fact, the album cover is an actual photo of those smoke-obscured mountains that Morgan himself took from a rowboat on a lake.
Obviously, veiled & water-adjacent melancholy is nothing new for Morgan, but he brings a fresh intensity and an ingenious new approach to rhythm to his usual vision on pieces like the brilliant opener “Arrhythmia.” The insistent pulse of skipping loops suggests a malfunctioning amusement park wave machine that is furiously churning out waves of killer dub-techno fragments while its overworked pressure valves rhythmically vent bursts of steam. In fact, one of my favorite facets of this album is how masterfully Morgan creates rhythms with an unconventional palette of hisses, throbs, and subtle metallic textures rather than anything resembling a kick drum or cymbals.
The following “Bell Flame” works similar magic with skipping loops of ambient shimmer anchored by an insistently repeating bass motif, evoking a lonely early morning drive along a dramatic cliffside as the sunrise burns slowly away the last vestiges of morning mist. The album’s finest moment, however, is “Flutter,” which gorgeously combines a deep, dubby bass motif with blearily streaking, warped, and choppy chords. While the album admittedly ends with a bit of a lull (the final two ambient pieces), damn near everything before that point is pure (and almost impossibly wonderful) headphone bliss, as Morgan is truly without peer in weaving together vivid and richly detailed layers of alternately hissing, jangling, heaving, churning, billowing, and machine-like textures.
