Loscil - Slow-motion astral journeys

Scott Morgan has scientifically proven that cosmic music – equally suited to indoor settings, such as spaceports, orbital stations, Venusian markets and the like – did not close out its life cycle with the celestial symphonies of “Cosmic Century” (Wallenstein, 1973), with the jagged epic of “Gilles Zeitschiff” (Sternenmädchen, 1974) or with the slowing of the warp engine courtesy of Klaus Schulze. The majestic kosmische musik, sketched out of primordial chaos by Ash Ra Tempel, by the formidable duo Witthüser and Westrupp and by the electronic outbursts of Sergius Golowin (“Lord Krishna Von Goloka”, from ’73, remains a gem of the highest order), after a dubious detour into new-age blending, seems to have found its original habitat again in the perfect simplicity of synthesis, in a koinè purged of any spiritual excesses (real or presumed) that had taken hold of its soul.

All this leads to the Loscil project helmed by this odd Vancouver-based Canadian, drummer for Dan Bejar's Destroyer and a certain disciple of the great German pioneer, capable of translating that glorious tradition into post-modern suites while retaining his own personality and a distinctive working method, close to the poetics of the second-phase Cluster (“Cluster II”, Metronome, 1972), to the melodic sense of Henry Mancini, but above all to that quintessentially undefinable composer, Gavin Bryars, with whom he often seeks common ground in the so-called suspension of dynamics.

Scott Morgan is a complex figure, singled out by some as the prototype of the contemporary composer (he writes soundtracks for DVD menus and websites, and scored two avant-garde shorts presented at the Barcelona Off-Line Flash Film Festival), and his unusual, quirky chamber (decompression) music is equally complex, built from long otherworldly textures, synthesizers fuelled by liquid hydrogen, and a fine distillation of Pan Sonic and Boards of Canada (with a touch of Brian Eno, naturally).

After a string of soundtracks for films, DVDs and CD-ROMs, Scott Morgan released his debut album under the Loscil name in 2001. The moniker is no accident, in fact, as it stems from the Csound software, specifically from the “looping oscillator” function found in laptops.

Released on Kranky, the Chicago label that has long been at the forefront of post-rock/ambient-drone music, Triple Point is an ambitious project right from its guiding concept: applying the principles of thermodynamics – the branch of physics that studies the conversion of heat into energy and vice versa – to a record. It's the culmination of the research begun on the self-released CD A New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies, whose six tracks are reprised here and rounded out with four previously unreleased pieces.

The blueprint is almost always the same: a central texture or rhythm, to which Morgan gradually adds small sonic embellishments, achieving maximum impact without indulging in the glitch-dependency that plagues so much contemporary electronic music. The conversion of heat into energy, the shifting between solid, liquid and gaseous states, translate into a constant sonic flow, with tracks flowing into one another almost seamlessly. It's a chilly ambient-techno, unfolding through long atmospheric textures, drones, mid-tempo beats and subtle electronic patterns.

The opener “Hydrogen” wedges a sturdy beat into thick blankets of electronic vapour, which grow even more imposing on “Vapour”, a sonic rendering of a steam locomotive hurtling at full speed. The hazes of “Zero” and “Fuel Energy” edge almost into industrial territory, while the foggy soundscapes of “Pressure”, where one can almost sense water coming to a boil, and “Discrete Entropy”, with its hyper-stretched carpets of sound, verge on the most extreme isolationism. “Absolute” closes the album with ten minutes of pure ambient-drone, fading slowly away and leaving behind a deep sense of calm.

The reference points are almost too obvious to mention, from Brian Eno to William Basinski, from Harold Budd to Cluster, right up to the more recent Labradford. And yet, right from the start, the distinctiveness of the Loscil asteroid is clear, with its slow-motion sidereal trajectories cast far beyond the gates of sensory perception.

The acclaim earned by his debut album allowed Morgan to embark on his first European tour, supporting Stars of the Lid and staging multimedia shows that blended sound with visual installations.

The second chapter of the Loscil saga takes shape a year later in another concept project: an album about submarines, for a total of about an hour of music.

Submers (2002) is thus the water album, an element that has always fascinated electronic music's great minds, from the storms of Drexciya to Basinski's "Watermusic". And so down we go, into the depths, through long drones, pads, noise, floating bass tones and oscillating loops, to probe even deeper into the dark recesses of the unconscious. Or you can simply close your eyes and slip slowly into a trance, induced by the mesmerizing play of refractions and echoes on the sea's surface.

Using samples and keyboards as his sound sources, Morgan forges a kolossal that is as titanic as it is more organic and structured than its predecessor, mastering every element with a now-steady hand.

Each of the nine tracks is named after a submarine and evokes an underwater sensory experience. The opening "Argonaut 1" dissolves into a bed of amorphous chords pierced by an intermittent, irregular rhythm, while various elements and effects alternate around the central melodic figure, each time seeming to want to throw the listener off balance and make them lose their bearings. Almost unexpectedly, then, come the obsessive rhythms of the following "Gymnote", which with its oscillating tones and muffled percussion almost seems to mimic the motion of waves.

At times the album loses itself in labyrinths of dry, techno-derived beats ("Nautilus", "Diable Marin"), or in dark, almost dub-inflected bass riffs (the energetic "Triton"); at other times the silence of the ocean's immense masses induces a numbing of the senses, relieved only by the occasional sporadic pulse ("Mute 3", "Le Plongeur").

Even in this darkness of the mind, though, glimmers of melody surface, perhaps wrung from a string sample or a faint reverb, as in "Resurgam", one of the record's gems, with its call-and-response between gaseous chords and tremulous tones. But the "highest" moment is the ending of "Kursk", a requiem for the Russian nuclear submarine swallowed by the icy waters of the Baltic along with its crew of 118 sailors. Slow and solemn, with distant signals appearing and vanishing in a vortex of extended drones, it chillingly reproduces the quiet desperation and underwater agony of the crew, doomed to an inexorable descent into the void.

Unlike many of his peers, Morgan doesn't simply repeat tones and loops ad nauseam, preferring instead to use them as a backdrop against which to set his dynamic contrasts of melody and rhythm. The oceanic cathedrals of Submers have their foundations firmly planted in tradition, yet they reveal an exquisitely modern aesthetic. Eno's airports, the underwater epos of Gavin Bryars's "The Sinking of the Titanic" and the classicism of Wolfgang Voigt's "Gas" live again in the laptop era, with an attitude not far removed from the minimal-techno school.

For his third album, Loscil opens up to real instruments, albeit suitably "processed" in the studio. And for the first time he's joined by other musicians: Jason Zumpano on Rhodes piano, Tim Loewen on guitar and Nyla Rany on cello improvise over sequences computer-elaborated by Morgan and derived from various "manipulated" sound sources. Morgan himself then digitally re-edits and mixes everything in the studio. The result is First Narrows (2004), seven symphonies of drones for a new concept, inspired by Vancouver's main "gateway" to the Pacific Ocean through the Lions Gate Bridge. The pulse of the megalopolis, its claustrophobic rhythms, set against the boundless expanses of the ocean, rippled by the icy currents of the North. Desolate sci-fi atmospheres warmed by humanly tormented timbres, but also an ethereal serenity, which almost seems to want to convince us of nature's dominance over man.

More subliminal and less explosive than the previous works, the album lives on notes that drift in hyperspace, on pacified lunar deserts from which only distant reverberations arrive, on velvety digital palpitations. The elegance is undeniable, even if perhaps the songwriting loses something in tension and pathos. Hence the minimal-techno caresses of the liquid "Sickbay" and the foggy "Lucy Dub", amid felted synths, repeated patterns and sidereal crackles, but also the signs of "human presence" among the machines, most perceptible in the ten minutes of the title track, finely chiseled by slide guitar, and in the bloodless melody of "Ema", sketched out by guitar amid persistent arpeggios and clouds of synth. The atmospheric oscillations of "Mode", the celestial drones of "Brittle" and the cello vibrations of the closing "Cloister" round out this alluring soundtrack for a metropolis at dusk, contemporary to and in some ways complementary to that of Pan American's "Quiet City".

Two more years of research pass before Plume (2006), on which Morgan continues the discourse, making slight adjustments to the basic architecture (with the surprising exception of "Chinook") while keeping unchanged the moods, the electronic temperament, the hypnotic and cerebral pantheon of the two previous albums. Yet with each further listen, the new elements give the impression of being not so irrelevant after all, and the Loscil sound takes on the appearance of a sonic flow in constant flux. Constant in motion, but unpredictable in pace. Much like "Motoc", the murky track that opens the album: a gloomy lunar movement, a humanoid serpent, a single mysterious, alienating loop, the most explicit link to the work released two years earlier. It's Scott Morgan himself who reveals the affinities between the two albums: "Compositionally, many tracks on 'Plume' are similar in approach to those on 'First Narrows'; they start with a harmonic root from which we developed a loose structure for the musicians to improvise over".

For the record, Morgan again brought in Jason Zumpano, Josh Lindstrom (xylophone and vibraphone) and Steve Wood, favoring a live dimension quite unlike the mathematical precision of First Narrows and Submers. The lengthy "Rorschach" confirms this intent. Dub rhythms and guitars veiled by ethereal synthesizers, arcane melodies, a pressing sense of claustrophobia, sudden disorientation, a keyboard vibrating with warm pulses.

Plume could be summed up this way, much like the atmospheres conceived in "Zephyr" and "Steam": noir streaks for a mystery set on Mars, a soundtrack for investigations under a sky with three suns. Plume's rooms undergo a partial rearrangement with "Chinook", a micro-variation on the theme that introduces a decidedly more urgent rhythm, a sort of allegro adagio, and breaks the sci-fi surfaces the ensemble had built up until then. Motifs that return with "Bellows" and its optimistic movements, with the suspended delicacy of "Halcyon" and the suite "Charlie", written specifically to accompany unwary astronauts through a dramatic landing on an unknown planet. It's easy to picture, under the notes of "Charlie", the gigantic interstellar ship setting down with extreme slowness onto the arid ground, and to imagine the argonauts taking their first steps into the unknown. The closing "Mistral" picks up the humus of "Moloc", bringing the exploration to an end in absolute emptiness.

A refined, intimate work, Plume is another gem in the prized Loscil collection, released in a particularly fruitful year for the electronic scene (Nathan Fake, Ellen Allien & Apparat, Hashimoto), which seems to have recovered the balance and poise of its best years.

Scott Morgan's art is the sublimation of a path through cerebral electronic music that starts with the founding fathers (Schulze, Eno, Riley, Reich, Budd) and reaches a present that is more vital than ever (Stars of the Lid, Lightwave, Eluvium). His musings are at once a stimulus for the nerve centers and a relaxant for the mind. The master from La Salle argued that ambient music should be a kind of music "both ignorable and interesting". Loscil pulls off the feat, though it's hard to argue that in his astral scores it's not the latter element that prevails.

A longer-than-usual gap in Scott Morgan's human and creative isolation precedes the following album, Endless Falls. Aside from the EP Strathcona Variations, released in late 2009 on Ghostly International, Loscil had gone untraced for a full four years. On his fifth new record, the Canadian artist remains faithful to his interstellar modulations and his Basinski-esque watermusic, yet reworks both into something smoother and decidedly less oppressive. While the nodal element of Morgan's compositions remains, the water of Endless Falls is no longer the shadowy water of Submers's inexorable ocean depths, but merely an atmospheric phenomenon, recurring and suspended in the air of his native Vancouver.

It's no coincidence that the album opens and closes with the sound of rain, recorded live by Morgan in his backyard, just like many of the other field recordings that are captured, processed and recombined alongside organic sound sources, drones and electronic textures.

Endless Falls is an album that doesn't live by sound filtering and transformation alone, presenting instead a varied bouquet of compositional approaches, ranging from the orchestral solemnity of the opening title track to the amniotic depths of the refined modulations of "Lake Orchard". Immersions in discontinuous flows, cosmic surges and a myriad of beats, reverbs and ripples follow one another relentlessly, propping up compositions that repeatedly seem to build dense, all-encompassing waves through meticulous loop work and dub cadences that, on "Shallow Water Blackout" and especially "Dub For Cascadia", wrap even the drops of an incessant rain in a sinuous trance.

Through a shifting sonic gallery made up of vital, swelling electronic undulations, microsounds and organic incursions of strings, guitar and piano, Endless Falls unfolds over a full hour (a bit more on the vinyl edition, which includes two exclusive tracks) like an impalpable elegy that leads, hand in hand, to the final outcome of "The Making Of Grief Point", the first track in Loscil's output to feature a vocal element, in the form of a hieratic recitation by Dan Bejar, which closes the record, richly reworking the fascination with small things and small sounds already typical of the refined Canadian artist.

The following year it's already time for Morgan's take on the icy ambient aesthetic that characterizes the Rome-based label Glacial Movements. After venturing into the rugged hinterland of his native Vancouver, dotted with lakes, waterfalls and canyons carved and shaped by ice, in search of sounds and suggestions suited to the thematic concept, he channels his experience into the fifty-five minutes of Coast/Range/Arc, which contain a vision that is, in a sense, more "domestic" and closer to isolationism.

Having set aside the dub cadences and electronic pulses of the previous record, Morgan sketches out six ambient symphonies, poised on the ridge between iteration and persistence, yet without giving up harmonic embraces of almost orchestral stature, nor the crackling vibrations that capture the unceasing process of ice cracking, melting and regenerating.

The almost "physical" thickening that marks the first part of the record can be felt in the hypnotic blanket of "Black Tusk" and in the variety of liquid reflections of "Fromme", while the two central tracks dissolve into shorter pieces that raise cathedrals of hibernated sound, static yet ready to vanish into hazy abstractions.

The two longer final tracks (both over ten minutes long), on the other hand, translate that impalpable orchestral quality into grainy sonic textures, whose ripples and spectral currents serve as a corollary to a documentary-like grandeur, not without a certain underlying tension.

Once again, beneath the apparent stillness of the icy surfaces lies life, sound and movement; Morgan has captured them, rendering them condensed into a sonic universe held in fragile yet perfect balance.

The everyday life of Vancouver and its surroundings continues to be a source of inspiration for Morgan's music on the following Sketches From New Brighton (2012), an album that replaces the atmospheric, icy suggestions of its immediate predecessors with an extreme compositional rigor and a more pronounced electronic component, in the form of irregular propulsions, sharp hisses and a beat that at times even ventures into territory close to minimal techno ("Collision Of The Pacific Gatherer").

There's no shortage of interlocking hypnotic oscillations and immersions into liquid ambient depths; if anything, it's as though Morgan worked by subtraction, gradually fading rhythms and kaleidoscopic flecks into the dense saturations of quiet urban nights. Even here, though, the compositional fabric remains extremely dense and varied: Morgan doesn't settle for the uniformity of an indistinct, swelling drone tide, but instead precisely traces its contours through a careful process of layering sonic textures, rhythmic fragments and guitar reverb.

The result is an album crafted with the usual care, one that confirms and expands on Morgan's organic framework with a richness and wealth of sonic detail that is truly rare within the vast landscape of ambient music.

After the autumn rain of Endless Falls, the glaciation of Cost/Range/Arc, the dirty snowfall of New Brighton and the ambient spring of the shared masterpiece with Bvdub, it's winter again for Scott Morgan. A winter that this time sounds lively, bright, in some ways paradoxically vital. All of it to portray an island that, for the half not "spoiled" by the presence of Vancouver's airport, can still be called a realm of untouched Nature to this day.

Sea Island (2014) is once again a journey, then, the document of an exploration. Of the same subject, Vancouver itself. But this time, more than ever, it takes the form of a story, a testimony, a logbook. Never before had a chapter in the Loscil saga tried to touch the material it described so closely, favoring physical, tangible sensation over contemplation.

The dub passages, already a founding element of the impressions of the recent past, become here the key to a fully-fledged mode of expression, one that definitively brings to fruition ground long explored in parallel with the latest Pan American record. Ground now open to incursions by "classical" instruments (strings, piano, voice) ready to stand alongside the electronics and settle into deep, jagged grooves. Thus the intermittent flashes that open "Ahull" mark a hypothetical handover, the departure from dry land of "Khanahmoot" toward that island where Nature reveals a life of its own. The care given to every sound borders on the obsessive here, from the whispers on which the dawn of "Iona" takes shape to the chimes that give rise to the amorphous passage of "Bleeding Ink", over which Ashley Pitre stages an evocative series of vocal calls.

On the floating sunset of "Sea Island Murders", in close contact with the latest Stars Of The Lid, and in the splendid bow to the most melancholic Eluvium on "En Masse", the partnership with Fieldhead is renewed instead — already alongside Morgan for a splendid split release and a shared tour — in the person of Kelly Wise, on piano duties. The fog of icy drones on "Catilina 1943", the warm harmonic embrace of "Holding Pattern" and the desolate nocturne of "Angle Of List" represent the only, partial comebacks to the original formula, flawlessly reconciled elsewhere with the organic present. Priceless proof of this comes in the treetops portrayed on "In Threes" and the hypnotic dewdrops at the heart of "Angle Of Loll".

It is in dynamism that Loscil encapsulates the key to his current stylistic signature, in a realism that is in some ways "traditionalist," preferring musical interpretation to the direct sonic capture of environment, choosing a path that is as complex as it is increasingly fascinating.

In 2015 it's still the sea that inspires him, but this time with a completely different project. Making use of new technologies, he abandons the physical format and attempts the path of infinite music. Adrift is an app installable on both Android and iOS containing four endless tracks dedicated to four true stories of ships that vanished without a trace. With Kelly Wyse on piano, Mark Bridges on cello and Elisa Thorn on harp, the four infinite compositions convey the sense of a journey lost in time, in the apparent senselessness of disappearance — which is, in fact, the inevitable fate of every human being and every human creation. Loscil leads us to lose ourselves in a space so vast that it overcomes that notion of the human which has in its beginning and its end an indissoluble mark. Infinite music thus becomes a metaphor for a disappearance that never ends, the post-life, an eternal repetition of voids whose only parenthesis is the brevity and emptiness of existence.

In 2016 he released Monument Builders, which draws on three fundamental inspirations: the thought of English philosopher John Gray, who has for years denounced humanity's dominion over the environment and other living beings; the pre-apocalyptic images of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which document industry's impact on nature; and finally the minimalist music of Philip Glass. Man, in his most concrete essence, is the true protagonist of the album: the "monument builder" in reinforced concrete who ambitiously defies eternity while being destined to lose, the creator of a new geological era (the Anthropocene) that is itself destined to vanish into nothing. This time the pessimism is almost absolute; it seems that man is by definition incapable of having a positive effect on the world that hosts him. Loscil's nihilism reaches a new level of awareness: the cold and darkness of concrete seem far greater than those of the ice or rain of previous years. "Weeds," perhaps the album's finest moment, comes very close to composer Philip Glass and can be likened to the vocal experiments of Tim Hecker on "Love Streams" (2016); the pseudo-voices that try to surface from the electronic depths could seem either post-human — new lives born after our disappearance — or incomprehensible voices born of de-evolved beings nearing their own extinction, in the style of the Residents.

Three years pass before a new LP. In 2019 he released Equivalents, dedicated to a series of 220 black-and-white photographs of clouds taken between 1925 and 1934 by American artist Alfred Stieglitz. The images capture certain aspects well: the fleetingness of existence (the photographed clouds held that position only in that instant and will never be photographable in the same way again) and abstraction, with the contrast between white and black diminishing until it merges into a grey in which clouds and sky seem fused together. To set music to the black-and-white photographs, Loscil chooses eight tracks defined by a fundamentally monochromatic sonic flow. The blue of the sky and the white of the clouds disappear entirely. Neither white nor black, but a grey that permeates the whole album (a metaphor for a feeling that pervades us and mirrors the anxieties of the present day), sometimes in a clearly monochrome fashion, other times seeking out a faint, barely shaded chiaroscuro.

Loscil elaborates and layers several piano compositions by Glenn Gould as performed by Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The journey ranges from the new electronics descended from Tim Hecker ("Equivalent 1") to the most ethereal ambient, where the piano notes stretch out further and further as if simulating the wind that deforms the clouds, continually giving them new shapes ("Equivalent 6"). When the piano is more recognizable, as on "Equivalent 3," Loscil reaches his most moving moments, largely reworkings of the earlier Monument Builders. Ghostly voices scattering over piano notes mark the brief "Equivalent 8," while the seventh track ("Equivalent 7") is a blatant nod to Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond."

Loscil still manages to render these mono-bichromatic images with emotion and unease, creating a soundtrack that is only occasionally that of a photographic collection, but could just as well be that of the sky visible in every corner of the world, where the dominant grey is merely a reflection of our own soul.

Just a few months later, Loscil returns to soundtracking an app with the new Lifelike (2019), a project halfway between a video game and a meditative experience, in search of a new concept of entertainment in which moving images — fluid and shifting according to hand movements — might create a kind of loss of contact with reality and encourage entry into a parallel virtual dimension. The album is enjoyable and has its good ideas, such as the beats of "Persistent" (closely tied to "Monument Builders"), the fast rhythms of "Rotator," the vaguely minimal repetitions of "Water Parrot" or the playful loops of "First Transformation." Certainly any app stands to gain a great deal from the involvement of a musician of Loscil's caliber; the reverse equation probably doesn't work as well, since confining an artist within the already fixed timings and rules of the videogame-music format is often more a limitation than an opportunity.

In 2021 comes Loscil's new gamble: taking just three minutes of a twenty-two-piece string orchestra's performance and manipulating it into an entire seventy-minute LP. Thus was born Clara (2021), an attempt to create something new without betraying himself, indeed maintaining a firm bond with his most celebrated works. Indeed, the album recalls above all Monument Builders, an LP that over the years has increasingly taken on the status of a classic. The loops and electronic rhythms repeat incessantly, rendering the original source (the string orchestra) essentially unrecognizable, and transforming it into a long symphony typical of the Canadian composer's dub-ambient style.

Either way, listening to Clara doesn't fully convince, as if the artist's career had run aground on a dead point from which he can no longer pull himself free. After a series of LPs that were always distinct from one another and always defined by some strong element, Loscil here seems merely to repeat old insights with less inspiration. A track like "Vespera" will inevitably appeal to those who loved the 2016 title track, just as "Lumina" might recall something from Endless Falls. But across these seventy typically ambient minutes, there still seems to be a lack of the stroke of genius Loscil had accustomed us to, that spark that set him apart from his contemporaries. That said, in tracks like "Aura" or "Orta" there are still genuinely evocative moments to be found.

It often seems that Loscil settles for the minimum effort and can no longer reach the heights of the past. In its most ambitious moment — the nine-minute title track — one glimpses the potential of the great sound-builder, but it still falls well short of the peaks of his extraordinary career.

It's time for Loscil to look back and gather onto a single CD a series of scattered tracks never released on previous LPs. The Sails p.1 (2022) is the first of two collections of music composed for theatre and contemporary dance across the years from 2014 to today. Anyone well acquainted with the Canadian composer's discography will immediately recognize how these tracks sound just like the most successful work of that era's Loscil, including Sea Island (2014) but above all what can be considered the masterpiece of that period, Monument Builders (2016). "Upstream" opens just like a track from that very album, with a single note dictating the tempo and synths hovering mysteriously, painting abstract worlds. This structure (repeated note and synths) is typical of Loscil, but despite being already familiar it always proves effective. Morgan also manages to evoke the pianism of John Cage on "Cobalt," the most intimate and minimal moment, probably the most touching, with a series of equidistant piano notes, all at the same tempo (in a manner similar to "In A Landscape"), torn apart by synthetic stabs. "Twenty-One" returns to more typically cosmic sounds, while effective downtempo techno moments come in "Wells" and "Container," confirming a talent that has now maintained excellent standards for over twenty years.

The Sails p. 2, released just a few weeks later, leaves less of a mark.

The recognizable style remains, but this second collection gives more the impression of a minor work. Even so, it's clear that anyone who loves Loscil's dub-tinged sound cannot help but appreciate "Blue," which sits close to the style of his most celebrated work. For the rest, other ambient moments feel like sterile repetitions of already familiar tropes, even if Loscil retains his particular gift for turning elements of great simplicity into poetic moments; thus a stretched-out, atmospheric track like "Century" reaches such ethereal, airy heights as to evoke sublime worlds. Setting aside a few filler moments, standouts include "Downstream," a dub composition where Loscil's already-known strengths emerge, and the sound walls of "Ink," six powerful minutes, almost Irisarri-like.

Made using an antique 19th-century pipe organ from Brisbane's Old Museum, subsequently reworked in the studio, Colours Of Air, a collaboration with Lawrence English, comes across as a failed attempt to reconcile two profoundly different experiences. Across the eight tracks, both Loscil's dub sensibility and Lawrence English's multilayered sound — the respective trademarks of each — get lost. Given the talent of both musicians, it's clear there's no shortage of interesting moments, such as the Basinski-esque "Acqua," or in the tracks closer to Loscil's sound ("Cyan," "Violet") or those nearer to English's ("Black"), while for the rest the album drags on rather laboriously, in a manner similar to Loscil's last LP, "Clara."

The only track that really seems to unite the two artists' approaches comes at the very end, in the eight minutes of "Magenta," described by the authors as a "seething, twilit sandstorm." The description is indeed an apt one, capturing the track's rhythmic pulse combined with lashes of synth that blend cosmic atmospheres, Carpenter-esque soundtrack qualities, and something of the best moments from each of their discographies. Could this be the starting point for a more fruitful future collaboration?

Umbel (2024) partially reverses course, confirming Scott Morgan's sound idea of building music out of a series of images – soundtracks, one might say, for photo exhibitions. The pictures gathered here are shot under particular lighting conditions, at dusk, in such a way as to render the landscape practically unrecognisable.

Loscil's music thus adapts to this alien version of reality, blending together various phases of his career: the cosmic one of his early days (the ecstatic visions of the magnificent "Dusk Gale", easily the best piece on the record), the subsequent phase of the Endless Falls period (the rains of "Kamouraska" set against a modern classical backdrop), the dub phase ("Shadow Maple" with its crescendos and the slow pulse running through it), right up to his recent, more intimate compositions (the title track and closer "Cyme").

In 2025 it's once again a reflection on the environment and on the traces left on it by humankind that serves as inspiration and gives fresh momentum to the Loscil project. Lake Fire – inspired by the natural cycle of destruction and regeneration clearly perceived during a trip through the mountains of British Columbia scarred by wildfires – ties together, better than ever, all the threads Morgan has explored, shaping dynamic, shape-shifting digressions meant to capture a state poised between tension and melancholy.

Marked by a complex, detail-rich sound design, the album features tracks that are partly freed from the stricter canons the Canadian musician usually applies, without ever betraying his sound, taking shape in tremulous formulations run through by extremely deep pulses ("Arrhythmia", "Silos"), hazy atmospheres ("Spark", "Flutter") and icy, brooding saturations ("Ash Clouds", "Doux"). It all adds up to a majestic, deeply immersive flow, woven with the skill of someone who knows how to draw convincing solutions from every shade across the whole grayscale – a palette that is, not by chance, the star of the cover photo.

Turned into an audiovisual performance taken on stage across Europe and Canada, Lake Fire and its live materials become the starting point for Ash, a new photo/music release with an emblematic title.

The heart of the work is in fact the image of what remains: strictly black-and-white photographs of trees struck by fire, of residual charcoal, of a landscape turned spectral, combined with pure geometries and warm colours. To comment on them, the Canadian musician opts for extreme rarefaction, in the form of synthetic nebulae freely expanding. The idiom here is pure ambient, stripped of any pulsing intersections, inclined to build harmonic movements that unfold slowly. A saturated sound that favours drone, almost entirely giving up the dub attitude, though at times it still finds the low frequencies that are a clear Loscil trademark ("Carbon", "Ember").

It's the mournful tone and brooding attitude of its predecessor that are carried forward here, with tracks such as "Crown" and "Cholla" becoming an essential distillation of the nervous atmospheres of "Spark" and "Flutter". A tendency toward monochrome that echoes the visual component of the zine, a weakening of Scott Morgan's sonic grandeur that is only partial, and only apparent.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo ("Endless Falls", "Coast/Range/Arc", "Sketches From New Brighton"), Matteo Meda ("Sea Island"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Adrift", "Monument Builders", "Equivalents", "Lifelike", "Clara", "The Sails p.1", "The Sails p.2", "Colours Of Air", "Umbel"), Peppe Trotta ("Lake Fire", "Ash")

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