Fog - A brief foray into artifice

With a population of seventy thousand, Wilmington is not only the most populous city in Delaware, but also the one where the current President of the United States, Joe Biden, had his residence before moving to the White House once elected. It's from this very same pleasant little city (that's how you'd put it, right?) that one of the most mysterious musicians of recent years hails - so mysterious, in fact, that he never replied to the various emails our devoted writer sent him, hoping to learn a little more about him and, above all, about his music. No great loss: in a world where visibility is everything, we should welcome artists who choose to hide, revealing themselves to others only through their art. In this specific case, Fog, rather than a musician in the traditional sense, seems to resemble a parallel universe where free-improvisation, electroacoustics, sound collage, mutant jazz, avant-folk and a "totalist" taste for the organization of sound all converge, manifesting as ever-shifting, elusive, "hazy" forms.

It was only in February of last year that Fog began making his recordings available via Bandcamp, the first of which, Basking In It, also kicked off the trilogy titled "Infinite Love". Marked by elusive, at times downright unsettling atmospheres, the album moves between exotic dark-ambient ("I Am The Center Of The Universe"), journeys through psychic jungles where the voices are pure hypnosis ("Every Tree Loses A Branch"), sermons laid over a carpet of alien disturbances ("The Cement, Holy Cement, It Does Bind Us To This Blessed Ground"), and clouds of darkness escorting liturgical formulas repeated like mantras ("Dung King, Pure God"). There's also room for the cosmic ascension of "Trillions" (which would have pleased Constance Demby) and for the formless electroacoustics of the title track, whose Holy Grail is chamber music suspended in mid-air.

After the disappointing EP Jeweled Throne, containing only the fifteen-minute eponymous track (which, to be charitable, could be described as an obtuse slab of noise), August 2022 brought the self-titled Fog, which represents, as the Bandcamp description puts it, the "culmination of seven months of terror". It's no coincidence, then, that these grooves are dominated by dark atmospheres ("Lord Please Help Me", "Lycurgus Cup"), at times sinisterly surreal ("Life In A Jar"), while "Limp Like A Newborn Deer" is caught between pulsing ambient and blasts of white noise.

The following November saw the release of the more predictable Idle Hands, which closes out the "Infinite Love" trilogy, on which Fog is joined by Dave aka Lamb Faucet (clarinet) and supported, in terms of inspiration and arrangement, by DMN (DarkMatterNebula).

Alongside the almost playful noise-making of "Popping Balloon Animals" and the destabilizing "Little Lamb" (a track that in its second half takes on a multidimensional density, with its various sound sources each pushing, independently, toward an anti-climax that perfectly sets the stage for the following "Painted Dogs", whose slow, inexorable crescendo suddenly cuts out), among the best tracks are "Time Is Running Out", a perfect soundtrack for an excursion into the tunnels of the unconscious, and above all "Hors D'oeuvres Are Served", precariously balanced between avant-garde chamber music, telluric percussion and a Captain Beefheart blowing into a clarinet as if at the end of his tether. Far less convincing, on the other hand, are the ultimately sterile fusion of dark-ambient and electroacoustics on the title track, the thriller-like framework of "The Magic Chord" and the jittery drone of "Infinite Love".

Not even three months pass before Fog returns with Insect, "a collage of all creatures great and small, created through a process of deep meditative thought". Three tracks in all: the hypnotic, tribal-ghostly ascent of the title track, the murky depths of "Between" and the percussive ritual of "Whale", with powerful thuds in its finale.

While Fog's previous works, cresting with Basking In It, had shown he had some interesting cards to play, nothing could have predicted the extraordinary leap in quality represented by Thirty Three, Recurring, presented as "an exploration of recurrence" and destined to remain one of the most creative records of recent years, albeit, in all likelihood, one of the most overlooked.

Supported by a string of collaborators – Australian Wagon Lord (trumpet), English CJT (Tibetan bells, guitar), Polish The Eternal Returns (electronics), and fellow countrymen Tsirko (kalimba), Neopoliten (bowed saw) and the trusty Dave (guitar, percussion, clarinet) – Fog (here splitting his time between sampler, electronics, percussion, guitar and piano) shapes his music with obsessive care, working both on fine detail and on the overall grain of the various textures. The result is a sonic space in which the listener can do nothing but surrender, the way one surrenders to a spell, swept up by the totality of a sound in which even the most insignificant detail – perhaps simply buried beneath whatever most easily rises to the surface – takes on enormous weight. For this reason, listening has to become a genuine "immersion", ideally aided by a good pair of headphones.

Thirty Three, Recurring opens with a recitation, in Spanish, of the opening verses of the Book of Genesis (“En el principio creó Dios los cielos y la tierra/ Y la tierra estaba desordenada y vacía, y las tinieblas estaban sobre la faz del abismo…” etc.), a recitation that continues over a bed of strings for roughly the first minute and a half of “Tall Shadows Of The Wind”, a title that clearly nods to the English title given to “Saye-haye Boland-e Baad”, an Iranian film with magical-realist leanings directed in 1979 by Bahman Farmanara. Through a chaos of strings and horns, “Tall Shadows Of The Wind” then resolves into a free-jazz maelstrom that fizzles out, questioningly, on the notes of a kalimba, whose figures recall a slowed-down version of the marimba solo that closes Captain Beefheart's “Petrified Forest”. Without a break, “Dancer” carries on with menacing touches of prepared piano and hypnotic synthesizer lines, amid gurgles and distant thuds, radioactive dawns, barking dogs and digital chatter, in an atmosphere forever charged with tension, which makes these five-odd minutes of music a perfect soundtrack for a surreal-toned horror film.

Introduced by the distorted, insistent sound of violin, “Moire” travels along a path built from a repetitive percussive weave, a synthetic drone and the exotic fragrances of clarinet, recalling the out-of-time ritualism of Third Ear Band (though filtered through a post-chamber-music lens), but also, in its whirling finale, the Hexlove of “Pija z Bogiem” (2009). In “Esther”, electroacoustics and the idea of folk as the voice of ancestrality meet the equally anarchic and rationalist spirit of the Chicago school's AACM, working splendidly as a metaphor for the more mysterious forces operating behind the screen of reality. The sense of disorientation conveyed by this music is amplified here by a calm piano melody that, at a certain point, seems almost to contemplate from above its own feverish unfolding.

After a psycho-industrial prelude, “Happy Ending Problem” pulls a ghostly fourth-world music out of its hat, one that Borbetomagus themselves might well have had a hand in making, worn out and clearly fresh from a long period of ascetic withdrawal during which the only records they listened to were those of Fausto Romitelli.

One never gets the sense that Fog and his fellow travelers might ever let their guard down when it comes to invention. Hence the barely two minutes of the startling “A Brief Foray Into Contrivance”, which could well be an outtake from some lost Sun Ra record, but above all is their own “Parable Of Arable Land” – to be understood not as the masterpiece debut by Red Crayola, but as a highly personal take on that very title track. “Thirty Three, Recurring” (the song), on the other hand, suggests a particularly unstable cosmic-jazz, full of ruinous plunges into electroacoustic chasms and evocations of rituals so ancient as to be almost entirely forgotten. This is also intensely cinematic music: witness the case of “Apothem”, minimalist at first and then disjointed, or indeed the eighteen minutes of “Of Collatz”, a slow, odyssean ascent toward the unsaid, in which every sonic source is bent to feed a droning circle that keeps turning back on itself, right up to a devastating explosion which, announced by the minimalist sound of the kalimba, marks the album's peak intensity just after the fourteenth minute. Once the jittery symphonism of “Epilogue” has worn down its last groove, there's nothing left to do but go back and savor once again this astonishing reservoir of creativity.

Announced as “an album centered on death and the process of coming to terms with it”, The Fly Circles The Drain As If It Were An Orchid Blooming was released in May 2024, containing over a hundred minutes of music. In this new, mammoth undertaking, Paul Dolden's influence remains firmly present in the background on several tracks (“some would call them fear-inducing”, Fog notes, referring above all to the album's first single, “May 30, 1431, Rouen, France”), just as the painstaking, meticulous work of layering sound sources remains solid, carried out as ever using the trusty Audacity.

Across these eleven tracks, the music pulses, vibrates and expands within mental spaces, playing on the contrast between repetition and accumulation. The overall effect, as in the opening title track (where the electronics seem to reproduce the hypnotic buzz of a fly, while strings float in the void and the whole thing unfolds like a soundtrack to uncertainty), is that of a landscape painted in existential tones. Fog also dips into the AACM's Chicago-school toolkit to move across an abstract electro-cosmic palette (“Tumors”, “You'll Hang for This”), or to lay the groundwork for a disorienting jam built on polyrhythms, vocal loops and synth bubbles (“The Process of Letting Go”), occasionally landing on a deeply destabilizing chamber music (“End-Stage Liver Disease”).

Fog's art is also one of perspectival distortion, in which psychic flow is bent into shapeless ecstasy (“It Doesn't Feel Good Anymore” and the first part of “Sodium Pentobarbital”). “Asbestosis” is another excursion into the unknown, this time propelled by a piston-like breath and, in turn, by hysterically martial drumming. In “Ab Aeterno”, meanwhile, a melancholy-laden choral piece takes center stage.

At the heart of the record stand the twenty-three minutes of “Threnody For Hernán Cortés”, opened by a violent free-improv conflagration of horribly filtered sax, gurgling synths, numbing pulses and violent brushstrokes, before being orchestrated like a symphony in which post-industrial and contemporary music walk hand in hand, venturing ever deeper into mists of nightmares.

Evocative and incredibly rich in detail, enigmatic and stimulating, The Fly Circles The Drain As If It Were An Orchid Blooming is destined to remain, like all of Fog's work, material for a select few insiders, as well as the final record of his brief but intense arc.

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