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William Ryan Fritch

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William Ryan Fritch, “Built Upon a Fearful Void” (Lost Tribe Sound, 2022)

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This latest double album from the California-based Fritch is something of a culmination of two separate long journeys, as it took eight misfortune-filled years to complete and it also concludes Lost Tribe’s “Built Upon a Fearful Void” series. While I am not necessarily sure that Fritch himself would agree that the end result was worth suffering through the gauntlet of lost hard drives and water-damaged tape reels that he had to navigate to get to this point, Built Upon a Fearful Void nevertheless meets my dauntingly high expectations for any major new statement from the composer. 

That said, I am certainly curious about how much the album changed between the ruined tape reels and Fritch’s decision to abandon “what remained of the salvaged material” and “rerecord the album entirely using only faint flickers of the old tapes and cassettes.” On one hand, some magic simply cannot be recaptured, yet that loss is balanced by the fact that Fritch’s work seems to only get better and better with each passing year. In any case, anyone who fell in love with Fritch’s work from 2019’s Deceptive Cadence will likely love this album too (particularly its first half), as Built Upon a Fearful Void is another impossibly rich and vivid plunge into a dreamlike and cinematic vision of bittersweet Americana (and some other very likable other things as well).

According to Fritch, Built Upon a Fearful Void is intended as “a two-part record—meditating on lost epochs, feeble mythologies, and the many deep gulfs in human knowledge and perception,” which are certainly themes that resonate more than I would like right now. While I am not sure how the shifting vistas of each individual disc are intended to explore the different conceptual themes, it is quite clear that each disc works as a self-contained album with its own thoughtful and satisfying dynamic arc. 

While the same instrumental palette (“pipe organ, reed instruments, voice, viola da gamba, prepared piano, pedal steel, viola d’amore, and banjo”) remains roughly intact for both of the album’s halves, the emphasis shifts emphatically towards more drone-inspired pipe organ meditations for the second disc. In broad terms, that means that the more orchestral first disc is a closer relative to Deceptive Cadence than the second one, as Fritch’s gorgeous string melodies are the heart of everything (along with his longstanding passion for vividly realized textures, of course). On the strongest pieces, Fritch’s ear for poignant melodies strikes a perfect balance with tactile physicality, elevating such pieces into something a bit more unique and transcendent.

Of course, business-as-usual Fritch remains perfectly fine by me as well, even if the thrill of discovery has dulled from my reasonable familiarity with his voluminous discography and its various phases. Still, the bookends on the first disc both handily attain some degree of transcendence for me (particularly the closing “Truest of Truisms”), as Fritch tends to go big with his opening and closing numbers. However, some of the album’s most sublime highlights fall between those two crescendos too. 

For example, “Canary” beautifully marries a lovely viola melody with frayed and haunted-sounding feedback and a viscerally crunching and clanging backdrop of unconventional percussion. Elsewhere, the heaving and rippling “Glossolalia” is a tour de force of spectral, ravaged melodies and churning elemental power. That said, “Truest of Truisms” definitely ends the first disc with one hell of an exclamation point, unfolding as an organically heaving dream of widescreen romanticism, crashing cymbals, and elegantly dancing melodies.

The second disc opens in far more subdued fashion, as the aptly named “Low Smoulder” transforms languorous, sacred-sounding organ drones into a slow-building swell of escalating intensity.Mood-wise, that piece makes for quite a representative introduction to the darker, more minimal second half, which feels a lot like a classical requiem that is either slowly burning up or veiled by supernatural fog.As with the first disc, the second disc too culminates in one of the album’s most ambitious and strikingly beautiful pieces. In fact, “A Wilderness to Be Suffered” may damn well be the strongest single piece on the album, as it feels like a slow motion organ mass with the melody loosely doubled by languorous swells of bowed viola da gamba. The actual piece is far more complex and beautiful than that description suggests, however, as the piece seems to blearily twist and wind around itself like curling tendrils of smoke.

Elsewhere, “The Shallow Veil” visits similar territory, but the organ theme seems to dissolve into a fog to bring the tender heartache of the viola da gamba melody into stark relief. There are also some nice tape or string noise textures that periodically materialize in the haze, which I wholeheartedly welcome. “Critical Mass” heads in a more fluttering and flickering drone-inspired direction, but ultimately arrives at a similarly satisfying balance of hallucinatory, soft-focus sounds and sharper, more anguished-sounding textures. Other highlights include the blearily lovely pipe organ reverie “Untimely,” which slowly blossoms into dynamically rich layers of shivering, rattling, and frayed beauty, and the slow-burning one-two punch of “Capacitance” and “Lay Hands Upon Us.” I especially love the sounds in the latter, as it almost sounds like a shoegaze-damaged singing saw performance.

There are a few other pieces like “The Cooling Board” that deserve mention as well, but it would be fair to describe Built Upon a Fearful Void‘s second disc as “variations on a theme.” Describing the actual theme being varied is bit more challenging, but I am going with “hypnagogic organ mass/heavy-hearted requiem for humanity enhanced with an inventive array of gnarled and gnawed textures.” 

Of the album’s two halves, I currently prefer the more melodic and percussion-enhanced first half, but the whole album is basically a world-building opus in a vein that is all Fritch’s own: the sweeping grandeur of the best soundtrack composers colliding with a talented sound designer and a producer with a real knack for subtly smeared and psychotropic textures. Finding all of those facets properly balanced on the same album is rare enough, but encountering them all in the same person feels like stumbling upon a goddamn unicorn in the wild.

Samples can be found here.

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William Ryan Fritch, “Deceptive Cadence: Music For Film Vol. I & Vol. II” (Lost Tribe Sound, 2019)

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I have only been familiar with William Ryan Fritch’s work for a couple of years, but he became one of my absolute favorite artists almost instantly. In fact, I have such unshakable faith in his vision that I even pounced on this lavish collection of works for film despite my similarly unshakable apathy towards soundtrack albums. My rational was that his first major release in two years had to be something truly special and the handful of pieces released in advance of the album seemed to bear that out. As it happens, the rest of this double album is every bit as wonderful as those teasers: Deceptive Cadence may very well be Fritch‚Äôs career-defining masterpiece. It certainly deserves to be, as Fritch approached it as a true labor of love, tirelessly revisiting, reworking, and paring down years of disparate projects until he had a gorgeously bittersweet tour de force of sublime grandeur.

The first volume of Deceptive Cadence arguably dates back from 2015, as many of these pieces were modestly released in digital-only format as Music For Film Vol. I. This latest incarnation has undergone quite a dramatic transformation between then and now though, as Fritch “dove back into Volume I, carving away the fat, leaving only the most breathtaking pieces from the original and replacing the rest with assuredly more mature and enduring compositions.” Remarkably, that description is actually a bit of an understatement, as I estimate that at least half of that album did not survive Fritch’s curatorial bloodbath. 

As for the remaining pieces, they have been re-edited, re-sequenced, and interspersed with newer works to form a beautifully flowing and coherent whole. That certainly seems like a quixotically labor-intensive endeavor, but I wish more artists would follow suit: for the purposes of this album, it does not matter when a piece was recorded or what film it may have appeared in. None of that information is even provided and that makes perfect sense to me. These pieces have all served their original purpose in the work of others, so now Fritch is free and willing to chop them up to suit a vision that is his alone. 

In the case of Deceptive Cadence, that vision is a kind of rustic Americana filled with rippling, sun-dappled arpeggios that blossom into boldly churning string melodies. The finest example of that sensibility is probably “A Renewed Sense,” as cello and violin themes dance and intertwine en route to a swooning crescendo that verges on the rapturous. The soaring and poignant “Mending What We’ve Cleft” achieves a similar feat, but nearly every piece embodies the elusive lightness of touch necessary to achieve aching beauty and tenderness without ever erring into melancholy, bombast, or saccharine prettiness. There are easily three or four other pieces in the first volume that qualify as legitimate highlights (and zero pieces that I would skip). It is an absolute feast of lightness, warmth, and memorable melodies.

While Deceptive Cadence‘s second half seems to be composed entirely of more recent material, the transition between the two albums is very much a seamless one. In fact, the entirety of this collection feels like a hallucinatory director’s cut of Westworld with all of the violence and plot excised to leave only a poetic and impressionist swirl of warm memories and majestic scenery. There is definitely more of an undercurrent of darkness with the newer material though, as well as a more varied approach to mood and structure. I would not necessarily say that it is more sophisticated, but it does feel like it has more of a deliberate arc and pace: it would not be completely crazy to characterize Vol. I as a melody-driven singles collection and Vol. II as its more abstract and atmospheric shadow. 

There are some notably exceptions though. The most striking one is “Ricochet,” which begins with a half-thorny/half-twinkling jangle of overlapping mandolins that elegantly and seamlessly transforms into something resembling a Wild West wedding dance. Fritch does not stop there, however, and “Ricochet” continues to organically grow and evolve until it finally explodes into a soaring and vivid heaven of simultaneous ascending and descending melodies. Regrettably, it ends all too soon for my liking, but that is probably for the best as I probably would have died from pure joy if it had gone on any longer than three minutes. 

Elsewhere, I was struck by the haunting cello melody that rises from the warmly languorous dreamscape of “Gut Level.” “Dumbstruck” is a highlight as well, as its early drones blossom into a churning and serpentine dance of darkly lovely strings. In general, however, the second volume feels like a sustained reverie, albeit one regularly punctuated by alternating interludes of brooding melody and shimmering, fluttering radiance.

I enjoy both volumes quite a bit, but it is the first volume that I could probably play in an infinite loop for days without ever growing weary of it. When he is at his best, Fritch’s melodies and themes feel like a divine choreography that fluidly and airily swirls, sways, and dances, making it seem like transcending and dissolving conventional structure is the most natural and effortless thing in the world. Fritch is the rarest form of iconoclast: the kind who carves out a truly wonderful and distinctive niche solely by bringing together obvious threads that few others have managed to convincingly combine before (and executing that feat masterfully).

In a way, Deceptive Cadence feels like a glimpse of an alternate timeline in which modern classical music never became mired in increasingly challenging sounds and ambitious concepts. Instead, it devotedly remained in pursuit of pure beauty, but learned a few things along the way from the looseness, simplicity, and soul of Bob Dylan and the starry-eyed romanticism of vintage Hollywood cinema. 

Fritch is not shy about exploiting his formidable gifts for arrangement or production enhancements, yet he has an uncanny intuition for allowing just the right themes to remain raw enough to make a direct emotional impact. These pieces often sound like the work of tight traditional folk ensemble that has been elevated into something unnaturally lush, layered, and dreamlike by the hands of a great drone artist who has been very careful not to lose their earthy, lyrical essence. 

Moreover, the bulk of Deceptive Cadence resembles a soundtrack only stylistically, evoking a vivid, living world on its own rather than feeling like one decontextualized aspect of a larger work. This is an ambitious, complete, and extraordinary work all by itself. If anything else comes along in the next six months to unseat Deceptive Cadence as one of my favorite albums of the year, it will have to be one hell of a revelatory release.

Samples can be found here.