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Students of Decay

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Angelo Harmsworth, “Singe” (Students of Decay, 2022)

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I was a bit later to the Angelo Harmsworth party than I would have liked, but the Berlin-based American composer has been fitfully releasing very distinctive blown-out “ambient” albums for about a decade now on an array of hip and discriminating small labels (Opal Tapes, Vaagner, enmossed, Psychic Liberation, etc.). Harmsworth’s latest is his first for Students of Decay and marks a rare vinyl outing, as most of his previous physical releases have been limited to cassette. According to the label, Singe “may be the high water mark” of Harmsworth’s career to date, which does feel like a completely plausible claim, but one that is very hard to confidently echo given how many killer Harmsworth pieces already exist. Even if Singe fails to conclusively eclipse all of Harmsworth’s past triumphs, however, it does seem to be one of his most consistently strong releases and an ideal starting point for the curious.

Notably, describing Harmsworth’s vision as “ambient” or even “power ambient” feels cruelly reductionist, which is probably why he amusingly titled a 2020 release Fully Automated Luxury Ambient. That imaginary subgenre feels much closer to the mark, as the intensity and textural inventiveness that Angelo brings to these compositions shares far more common ground with artists like Tim Hecker or Fennesz (or collapsing power lines during a live volcano) than it does with anyone trafficking in droning, meditative loops.

Those craving the aforementioned “collapsing power lines” vibe will have a mercifully short wait, as the opening “Igniting the Periphery” calls to mind buzzing high tension wires swayed by a deep seismic shudder as the surrounding buildings collapse in slow motion. There are some other elements as well, like fragments of twinkling piano and warm waves of frayed drones, but the viscerally heaving, buzzing, and gnarled wreckage at the heart of the piece is the showstopper—everything else is just there to color the mood. That balance holds true for the rest of the album as well, as the Singe experience feels akin to wandering through six cataclysmic yet weirdly beautiful natural disasters. For example, the crackling and hissing “Frothed” evokes slow jets of magma breaking through a buckling, blasted landscape, while “Drip Motion” has the feel of a storm slowly forming and then slowly dissipating.

In short, Harmsworth harnesses the proverbial “force of nature” and wields it beautifully. That said, “Drip Motion” is an album highlight for more conventionally musical reasons as well, as it resembles the burning and heaving wreckage of a killer Porter Ricks cut fading in and out of focus. “A Twofold Excess” then ends the album’s first half with yet another gem, as it feels like slowed-down footage of a tornado ripping apart a sawmill before dissolving into a sublime coda of sputtering static, tender piano, and warbling, whimpering streaks of psychedelia.

Somehow, the weather forecast only gets crazier for the album’s second half, though that is hardly surprising given that “Aporia” seems to not even be earthbound anymore, as Harmsworth conjures a buzzing and shuddering alien landscape of strangled static and quivering feedback. In addition to that, there are some elements that sound like field recordings of a welding crew on the Death Star along with a guest appearance by Felisha Ledesma. Sadly, Ledesma does not stick around very long (I’m a big fan of her Fringe album), but a human voice emerging from the howling industrial ruin was unexpected enough to leave an impression regardless.

Elsewhere, “Reversing the Procession” calls to mind flickering ghosts in the burning, buckling hull of a sinking shop and probably marks the album’s zenith as far as sheer churning physicality is concerned. The closing “Scope Neglect” may be the album’s zenith beauty-wise though, calling to mind slow-motion footage of a burning spacecraft breaking apart as it falls to earth. Hell, I’ll even throw in a dramatic sunset as a backdrop, as “Scope Neglect” is an absolutely gorgeous example of Harmsworth’s vision of elemental power and blackened beauty. And Singe is one hell of an album. In fact, I would be hard pressed to think of another artist who could have made an album in this vein without lapsing into unlistenable bombast or erring too much into the “noise” or “ambient” side of the delicate balance. In Harmsworth’s hands, however, Singe feels like a series of vivid field recordings taken from the end of the world.

Listen here.

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Sarah Davachi, “All My Circles Run” (Students of Decay, 2016)

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Following hot on the heels of this year’s synth-centric Dominions, Sarah Davachi returns to Students of Decay for a bit of an unexpected curveball: an album with no synthesizer at all. Employing an organ, some strings, a piano, and her own voice, Davachi mostly reprises the minimal, drone-centered aesthetic of her previous work (she is quite fond of sustained notes and slow-building harmonies), but also impressively expands her niche with a few more conventionally melodic pieces. As a result, the elegant and understated All My Circles Run is likely the most diverse of Davachi’s albums to date, sustaining a slow-burning and subtly shifting reverie for forty sublime minutes.

The album opens in characteristically Davachi-esque fashion, as a simple, gently undulating violin drone unfolds for over a minute before any overt transformation begins to creep in. In fact, “For Strings” may very well capture Davachi at her most minimalistic, as the entire piece is essentially just a hazy, slow-motion massing of notes into a lush chord (or at least a more harmonically rich drone). There is a bit of a minor surprise at the end, however, as all of the strings gradually disappear to leave behind an unexpected wake of quietly throbbing and stuttering noise. It is quite a clever bit of compositional sleight of hand: using an ostensibly straightforward drone piece to secretly weave a complex undercurrent of uncomfortably oscillating harmonies, then pulling back the veil to reveal it. I enjoy surprises and neat tricks. 

I was actually quite a bit more taken with the following “For Voice” though (matter-of-fact song titles abound here). Using only her own voice and a sustained and wobbly thrum, Davachi casts a haunting and evocative spell as the various soft-focus layers of wordless, angelic voices intertwine to form eerie minor key harmonies. Unlike many Davachi pieces, “Voices” appears in a fully formed state and stays that way for nearly ten minutes of dreamlike, otherworldly beauty, as there is no need to blossom into anything more. 

“Chanter,” which follows, is yet another divergence from the expected, albeit a somewhat less heavenly one. While a “chanter” is part of a bagpipe, the piece sounds very much like it was played on a submerged piano. Much like “For Strings,” it is yet another piece where a very simple theme undergoes a very subtle and slow-motion transformation. In this case, the repeating two-chord theme is gradually muddied by the addition of other notes, which gradually darkens the harmonic waters to increasingly hallucinatory and disquieting effect.

“For Organ” returns to a bit more familiar and established territory, as a sustained organ drone gently undulates in apparent stasis as other notes slowly and sneakily seep in to subtly shift its mood and coloration. Unexpectedly, however, Sarah begins playing actual, overt notes around the halfway point and the transformation is greatly accelerated into a lush, shimmering haze of gently pulsing harmonies. 

The album’s final piece, however, does not seem particularly indebted to Davachi’s previous work at all, as “For Piano” is essentially a simple, gentle, and melodic piano miniature that falls within shouting distance of artists like Harold Budd and Stars of the Lid. The sole “Davachi” touch is merely that the piano is competing for the foreground with a very prominent and visceral string drone that provides a sharp counterbalance to the pieces more pastoral aspects. 

It is not my favorite piece on the album by any means, but it works quite well nonetheless, as Sarah has found a way to expand outwards into more serene territory without quite losing her bite. Also, I was caught very much off-guard when the piano part actually changed into something new and became fairly loose and improvisatory, a tactic that seems almost radical in the context of Davachi’s history of patient, glacially unfolding accretion.

In a way, “For Piano” might actually be the most significant piece on the entire album, as even the similarly divergent “For Voice” sticks quite close to Davachi’s comfort zone of skillfully crafted, slow-moving threads that twist together to yield vibrant textures and rich harmonies. That aesthetic obviously works quite well, but it is necessarily a somewhat constrained one that is hard to explore for long without everything starting to sound over-familiar. 

While several of the other pieces are much more to my liking (particularly “For Voice”), it is “For Piano” that shakes up Sarah’s aesthetic the most by incorporating loose and evolving melodies and drifting quite far from the original motif. It will certainly be interesting to see where Davachi evolves from here, but all bets are off for now, as she is about to release her third album of 2016 on Important and there is no clear arc that I can unravel with such a condensed chronology. In any case, All My Circles Run is yet another fine album from Davachi, using deceptive simplicity as a foundation for sneakily escalating complexity and vivid harmonic depth. I do not think that it necessarily surpasses Barons Court, but it is very much on a similar level.

Listen here.

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Sarah Davachi, “Barons Court” (Students of Decay, 2015)

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Sarah Davachi is a young Vancouver-based artist who shares that passion for old analog synthesizers that is so rampant these days. Stylistically, however, she is an old-style composer that shares much more common ground with minimalist drone royalty like Éliane Radigue and Phill Niblock than she does with the current pack of squiggling, blurting, and entropy-minded synth revivalists. Also, she seems to have a fine intuitive grasp on the limits of such gear and ingeniously employs strings, flutes, and a harmonium to elevate her pieces into something better and more distinctly her own. More importantly, this is exactly the sort of drone that I love and Davachi manages to do it better than just about anybody. This is already a lock for one of my favorite albums of 2015. 

I never expected to turn into someone who has strong opinions and passions regarding minimal drone, but it seems as though I somehow wound up that way despite my best efforts. While there are plenty drone albums that I enjoy, there are only a handful that absolutely delight me. Barons Court happily falls into that rare latter category, though it is difficult to articulate quite why, as extremely minimal music succeeds or fails almost entirely in its execution. Literally anyone can let a single note gently oscillate for ten minutes, but it takes a particular strain of genius (as well as superhuman patience and near-surgical attention to detail) to transform that into something mesmerizing. For most of Barons Court, Davachi does just that.

Notably, Davachi is not quite as “pure” or aggressively minimal as some of her kindred spirits: while these pieces are certainly built upon the expected bed of quavering analog synthesizer, she often allows her drones to gradually cohere into a lush, warm, and languorously undulating chord. In fact, that is essentially all that happens in the 8-minute “Wood Green” and it is wonderful. In the other pieces, however, she twists that formula in a variety of compelling ways. 

“Tiergarten,” for example, follows roughly a similar trajectory, but darkens the waters with subtly dissonant harmonies and uneasy oscillations. The opening “Heliotrope,” on the other hand, is dissonant right out of the gate with a churning, uncomfortable swirl of bowed cello harmonies. Then, around the halfway point, Davachi transforms that subtle menace into deeply uneasy and unearthly beauty with the addition of some very ghostly flutes that recall Natural Snow Buildings at their best. The album’s centerpiece, the 13-minute “Guildford,” achieves a similarly haunting majesty, replacing those demonic flutes with spectral, floating synth swells and hypnotic harmonium drones. Then gradually, the darkness ebbs away a bit to make way for a more enigmatic mood of timeless, ritualistic-sounding beauty. It is an absolutely stellar piece, as is “Heliotrope.”

The final piece, “Ruislip,” is arguably something of a wobble that stands in the way of my proclaiming Barons Court to be an absolutely perfect album. However, if it is a misstep, it is admittedly a very subjective one: in most respects, it is a lot like everything great that preceded it, but the timbre of the synthesizer just has that annoying, artificial “’70s science documentary” edge to it that I cannot stand. 

Eventually that edge becomes dulled enough to enjoy though, as the piece gradually coheres into a masterfully warped and hallucinatory crescendo. I guess I remain somewhat on the fence about that one, though I will note that I vastly prefer the dubious gamble of “Ruislip” to the edgeless, blissed-out drone soup that most artists churn out these days. As far as everything else is concerned, however, Barons Court is an absolute monster of a debut: Davachi is a strong composer, an excellent stylist, and a remarkably assured and inventive new artist. I love this.

Listen here.

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Natural Snow Buildings/Isengrind/Twinsistermoon, “The Snowbringer Cult” (Students of Decay/Ba Da Bing, 2008)

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Ba Da Bing are clearly not ones to shy away from massive undertakings, following last year’s 4LP Night Coercion into the Company of Witches reissue with yet another quadruple LP. 2008’s The Snowbringer Cult was a monumental album for Natural Snow Buildings at the time of its release, as it was their first effort that was not available only as a hyper-limited cassette or CDr. As such, it was many people’s first exposure to the duo and Mehdi and Solange definitely set out to make it count, packing it with just about every single possible facet of their sound. That “kitchen sink” approach does not make for the most listenable whole, but Snowbringer is not lacking in sustained stretches of absolute, otherworldly brilliance.

The original version of The Snowbringer Cult was released as a double CD by Students of Decay, a format that remains in place for this reissue. The first disc contains a solo album by each member of the band, while the second disc is a lengthy collaborative effort. Aside from the addition of a vinyl format, the reissue remains completely faithful to the original album in every way. That was a wise decision, as only a lunatic would add bonus tracks to a 2+ hour album and the original art is thematically integral to the overall package (and also difficult to improve upon). Also, remastering or “cleaning up” such a beautifully and uniquely produced album would be criminal. The only truly significant change is that all three albums are now available as stand-alone releases, which makes them much easier to absorb. That was a truly great idea.

The Isengrind album (Solange Gularte’s solo project) is the shortest of the three, clocking in at just over half an hour. Despite that comparative brevity, it contains many of the set’s highlights, as Gularte was in the midst of a particularly fruitful creative period at the time. With few exceptions, the mood is a very shadowy and ritualistic one, leaning very heavily on droning Indian stringed instruments, choruses of ghostly chanting, clattering percussive flourishes, and eerily discordant flutes and pipes. 

On the best pieces, such as “To Ride With Hölle” and “Wooden False Face,” Solange manages to sound so anachronistic and alien that it is actually far easier to imagine that this is an ancient field recording of a long-forgotten cult in the midst of a human sacrifice than the solo project of a contemporary French woman. In fact, the latter often seems impossible. The mesmerizing spell is disrupted only once, as the somewhat ill-advised “Cat’s Cradle” dragged me reluctantly back to the present by drifting too closely to contemporary Freak Folk territory. Happily, that song can easily be deleted from an iTunes library to leave a near-perfect album, but vinyl owners will just have to try to get used to it.

The Twinsistermoon half of the disc unsurprisingly shares a lot of common ground with Solange’s effort, offering up still more occult-sounding drones, dissonant woodwinds, and tribal percussion. There are some significant differences, however. For one, Mehdi Ameziane’s drone pieces are more dense and grinding than Solange’s. More significantly, those heavier pieces are interspersed with a number of melancholy and sweetly child-like acoustic ballads. Another key difference is that the illusion of timelessness is not quite as effectively maintained as it is with the Isengrind portion, though that is mostly by design. 

On songs like “Order of the Dreamt,” Ameziane balances his more traditional instrumentation with roiling distortion and spacey flanging to create his own surreal headspace. I am also quite fond of “Spells,” which artfully combines Mehdi’s talents for both ritualistic “funeral procession” percussion and cascading acoustic arpeggios. The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, however, alternating between Mehdi’s simple, eerie campfire songs and some lo-fi metallic drones. Those remaining pieces are not exactly weak, but they are easily eclipsed by both Twinsistermoon’s own post-Snowbringer work and the rest of this album (which is excellent).

I was very happy to learn that Ba Da Bing were making the Natural Snow Buildings’ portion of The Snowbringer Cult available on its own, as it unquestionably one of the duo’s finest albums and needs to be heard by itself (and with fresh ears) to be fully appreciated. However, its original inclusion as the final disc of a three-way split release with the duo’s solo projects was kind of an inspired idea, as it beautifully illustrated how the duo united was so much greater than the sum of its parts. That is not necessarily true now, as both solo projects have evolved greatly in recent years, but Mehdi and Solange’s collaborations still felt like a stunning and magical transformation back in 2008. While I definitely like the Isengrind and Twinsistermoon segments of this collection, the Natural Snow Buildings portion of The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely revelatory and dreamlike tour de force from start to finish.

Actually, “dreamlike” might be a bit misleading, as the opening “Resurrect Dead on Planet Six” (a cryptic Toynbee Tiles reference?) is much closer to a nightmare, building from queasily dissonant drones and flickering echoes into a roaring, visceral crescendo of guitar noise. Structurally, it closely resembles some of Mehdi’s solo work, but its execution is so complexly multilayered and seamlessly organic in its flow that it rises to a completely different level. That trend basically holds for the entirety of the album: expected ideas are alchemically turned into otherworldly brilliance through ingenious layering and deft transitions (and it all sounds both massive and gloriously anachronistic).

With very few exceptions, almost all of these ten songs are highlights, a fact that is even more remarkable given the uncharacteristically varied stylistic territory covered. “Inuk’s Song,” for example, is a gently rippling and hallucinatory reverie, while “Nieve Sacra” resembles a spacey, psych-damaged Morricone and “They Do Not Come Knocking There Any More” approximates a full-on tribal war march. The more abstract title piece, on the other hand, basically resembles nothing else that earthbound mortals have recorded outside of Natural Snow Buildings: my best approximation would probably be “an ancient voodoo ceremony is sucked through a black hole and eventually re-emerges mashed up with the doomed Children’s Crusade of 1212.” If there is a higher compliment for a piece of music, I certainly cannot think of it.

As was the case with Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely exhausting and overwhelming listen in its entirety, which is its primary flaw. There is way too much here to reasonably process and not all of it is great. The similarities end there though: Night Coercion was a time capsule from a formative, largely unheard era of Natural Snow Buildings’ career, while The Snowbringer Cult captures the duo at their absolute collaborative zenith. The other major difference is that the best part of The Snowbringer Cult is now available by itself, no longer diluted by the inclusion of two full other albums worth of songs…and it is absolutely, screamingly essential. The Isengrind/Twinsistermoon albums are perfectly fine, of course, but the Natural Snow Buildings’ third is a strong candidate for the best thing that anybody will release this year (reissue or otherwise). This is the kind of album that I would run into a fire to save.

Listen here.