Brock Van Wey, “Home” (Echospace, 2014)
Five years ago, this San Francisco DJ/producer released quite a massive, remarkable, and distinctive ambient epic called White Clouds Drift On and On, his first album under his own name. Home is its follow-up and I have no idea quite what to make of it. In some ways, it surpasses its wonderful predecessor in its lush, melancholy grandeur. In other ways, however, its extreme length (almost 3 hours) coupled with its narrow, unwavering aesthetic serve to exaggerate its charms to the point of caricature or folly. There are still some wonderful songs here, of course, but too much of a good thing yields rapidly diminishing returns.
I seem to be covering a lot of albums lately that can be completely summarized in just one sentence, a trend which Home does not disrupt at all. In this case, that sentence is “billowing and warmly hissing swells of oceanic bliss.” There are a couple of things that set Von Wey apart from artists treading similar territory though. The main one is probably scale, as Brock’s “ambient” works sound absolutely symphonic in their complexity (and in their length). If I wanted to be unfairly reductive, I would say that most of Home sounds like one of the more beautiful instrumental passages from The Cure’s Disintegration layered and expanded into near-infinity, as it certainly has a similar narcotic feel and Romantic sadness. In reality, however, these pieces are far from unchanging loops—they just evolve from movement to movement so slowly as to be near-imperceptible.
The other trait that sets Brock apart from other ambient artists in this vein is that he is coming from a techno background rather than a drone one. That manifests itself most obviously in the ghostly loops of soulful vocal hooks that pervade the album, but also results in an occasional bass thump or dub-like flourish. Those elements are most effective in “Empty Houses Seen From Above” and “A Heart of Darkness,” particularly the latter, which makes excellent use of obsessively looping female vocal snippets. The overall effect is quite an unusual one in Van Wey’s hands, as he seems to be operating on a completely different timescale than other humans (for better or worse). The best summation I can provide is this: Holy Other sounds like sexy R&B blurred and slowed into a drugged haze—Home sounds like Holy Other sucked into a black hole and spat out the other side in an almost unrecognizably stretched and slowed form.
While that is admittedly a very cool and inventive feat, I have a few issues that prevent me from quite falling in love with this album, most of which are highly subjective. For one, its predecessor was more unusual, as it incorporated chopped-up and digitally mangled snatches of non-English vocals that favorably recalled Peter Christopherson’s The Threshold Houseboys Choir. I liked that. Of course, switching to exclusively using more conventional soul/dance vocal snippets is probably more “honest,” given Brock’s background, so I will give him a pass on that.
Another issue is that listening to Home feels uncomfortable voyeuristic, like I am eavesdropping on another man’s cathartic tour de force of sadness, though that would not have bothered me as much in my younger years (in fact, I probably would have loved it). Finally, Home is just absolutely monolithic in its aesthetic and scope, which is a double-edged sword: for me, a casual fan, this is simply way too much of the same thing. For someone more unambiguously enthusiastic about Brock’s vision, however, this is probably an absolute godsend (it certainly sounds like he spent several years crafting it). In any case, Home certainly feels like a hugely impressive achievement, albeit quite a highly personal, obsessive, and narrowly focused one.
Listen here.
