Cloud Circuit

This deeply unconventional Montreal-based duo of poet Deanna Radford and sound artist Jeremy Young have been fitfully recording together since 2017, but this is their proper full-length debut. While I have been a fan of Young’s solo work and other projects for a while now, Cloud Circuit is a different animal altogether, as the duo seek to craft music inspired by “communication glitches and lost connections.” In more concrete terms, the pair’s aesthetic is centered around the processing and deconstruction of Radford’s spoken word performances while Young weaves surreal and textured backdrops from oscillators, radio transmissions, tapes, found sounds, and the occasional piano or organ. A number of eclectic Montreal luminaries (Sam Shalabi, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, etc.) turn up to party as well, as does Sun Ra via his writings, but Radford and Young make quite a compelling team in their own, as this album hypnotically blurs the lines between spoken word, sound collage, and field recording in such innovative fashion that many of these pieces feel like actual songs with hooks despite lacking nearly all of the usual elements of traditional songcraft.

The opening “An Introduction to Cloud Genera” provides an appropriately surreal and representative introduction to the Cloud Circuit vision, as Radford dispassionately muses on an array of cloud-related themes over a shuddering and undulating percussion loop and a shimmering haze of drones. As Radford notes, clouds are always evolving and the same is true of Cloud Circuit, as her voice gradually splits off into two channels that move about spatially and her words are umpredictably broken up into decontextualized sound fragments. On Young’s end, the underlying rumble gradually becomes more intense, crackling, and textured, which roughly mirrors the trajectory of Radford’s voice. 

In the wrong hands, an album with these same minimal ingredients would likely veer off the rails into obscure sound poetry or noise territory, yet Radford and Young intuitively keep their vision grounded with a strong narrative, as Radford’s mysterious and poetic narratives act as a thread that guides me through an increasingly immersive swirl of vividly churning textures, vocal deconstructions, and dreamlike shimmer. Radford’s poetry is the hook, but the payoff lies in how the duo transform, reshape, and expand that hook in impressively psychedelic fashion.

While that winning formula makes this entire album an absolute delight from a “headphone album” perspective, the most instantly gratifying pieces tend to be the ones that drift closest to more conventional post-rock terrain such as “When My Lover Is Across the Ocean” and “Airbus 321/Everything Is Everything.” In the former, Radford ruminates on cables, bitsteams, human connections, and the physics of sound over a gravelly rhythmic loop and a subdued kick drum pulse, but it blossoms into a hauntingly poignant epic once the buzzing bass notes and shimmering drones fade into place. The latter follows a similar trajectory, as throbbing bass and a thumping kick drum propel celestial ambiance into a wonderfully trippy crescendo of swooping, buzzing, crunching, and squelching non-musical sounds. 

Elsewhere, “A Letter From the Cloud Eternal Network” is a more jazz-inspired highlight, as Radford’s enigmatic and vaguely threatening-sounding business proposal is beautifully backed by Peter Burton’s double bass groove and a squall of guest guitar noise from Shalabi. Even more leftfield surprises include a piece built from field recordings of bird songs made for Montreal’s Sound Map project (“The Birds of Champs des possibles”) and a manically ticking and buzzing interlude from an orchestra of egg timers (“You Know Every One of Those Seconds”).

The album’s pleasures run much deeper than the obvious highlights and eccentric surprises, however, as even the two short and abstract bonus tracks are quite cool. In “Spam Senders Speak!”, for example, Radford announces that she’s “about to spit,” then unleashes a multitrack cacophony of overlapping vocal threads culled from “spam, personal diaries, a family recipe, and Catherine Métayer’s editor’s note to Beside #15.” In the more understated “Stranger From The Sky,” on the other hand, Radford recites Sun Ra’s otherworldly proclamations over a disorienting haze of oscillator hums and whines. 

While the modest “Stranger in the Sky” does not quite rank among the album’s finest moments, Sun Ra is undeniably an appropriately otherworldly inspiration for this duo, as Cloud Circuit’s finest moments feels like I am following a mysterious voice into a supernatural electromagnetic storm. That is an extremely cool trick, of course, but the even cooler trick is that Radford and Young have managed to find so many fresh and interesting ways to repeat that feat, as the character of Radford’s words and the nature of Young’s accompaniment transform considerably from piece to piece and all of it tends to be quite mesmerizing. The unique chemistry between these two artists genuinely makes this album feel much greater than the sum of its parts, as Radford’s voice adds soul, mystery, and teasingly elusive meaning to Young’s soundscapes, while Young’s array of unconventional sound sources makes Radford’s poems feel like hallucinatory radio transmissions or coldly dystopian corporate press releases. This is a truly unique and wonderful debut.

Listen here.