Labradford - Cosmic Post-Rock

Early in their career, they'd been dubbed the American reincarnation of Pink Floyd. Later on, Labradford established themselves as a chamber-music version of the bands that, in the Nineties, dragged rock beyond its classic boundaries, putting it through a genuine revolution. In other words: "the post-rock crowd", from Tortoise to Dirty Three, from Gastr del Sol to June of '44. Within this galaxy, with its vague and ill-defined outlines, Labradford represent the most electronic and minimalist wing, one that certainly absorbed the legacy of Pink Floyd, but also that of the German masters Neu!, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, as well as that of the godfather of ambient music, Brian Eno, linking it back to the contemporaneous English scene (the so-called Bristol-psych) carried forward by acts like Flying Saucer Attack and Main.

Post-rock, after all, soon turned into a mere attitude, grounded in the most varied contaminations of rock, jazz, classical music and electronics. And it managed to change the taste of rock fans altogether. Just consider the modest success of an album like E Luxo So, entirely instrumental, with no song titles, minimalist and repetitive: once upon a time it would have been confined to the narrow niche of the avant-garde, eyed with suspicion by anyone used to guitars and 4/4 beats. An ethereal rock, with fragile cartilage, living off slender melodic threads sent into "loop" mode and evanescent ambient digressions. A handful of notes, sometimes a single sound, are sketched out, and from them, through careful layering of instruments, minimal yet fully realised sonic structures are built.

Labradford were formed in Richmond, Virginia, as an instrumental duo: Carter Brown (electronic keyboards) and Mark Nelson (guitar and vocals). They started playing in 1992, united by a love of the most experimental sounds and of kraut-rock, the German electronic music of the Seventies, which the two regard as "a tradition in its own right". Their recipe calls for the simultaneous use of traditional rock instruments and modern electronic equipment.

The monumental Prazision, the inaugural title of the Kranky catalogue, came out in October 1993, immediately drawing the attention of the specialist press and the underground intelligentsia.

Recorded by Carter Brown alone (moog, vocoder, synths) and Mark Nelson (electric and acoustic guitars, tape loops, vocals), the album is an eleven-track excursion into territories that only brush past rock's usual tropes, favouring instead solutions closer to the avant-garde. "Listening In Depth", placed at the opening, is a fine example of this attitude, crossed by psych winds brushing up against industrial figures that pulse statically for the whole length of the track. The same goes for "Experience The Gated Oscillator", built around noise modulations, or "Sliding Glass", where sparse guitar notes are intermittently submerged by cosmic drones.

Elsewhere, calmer, almost ambient atmospheres take over instead, as in "Splash Down", with a barely whispered voice that gets lost among synth touches and minimal guitar patterns; the same goes for pieces like "C. Of People", the ethereal "Disremembering" or "Soft Return". Melodies that are at times impalpable, occasionally bordering on isolationism, alternate with moments of the opposite sign, dominated by post-industrial scenarios and dark, oppressive, Lynchian atmospheres. Sounds that are never cold or self-referential: ambient music, yes, but with real songs hiding behind it. "Accelerating On A Smoother Road" drives this home, an acoustic guitar, almost shoegaze in its insistence on a handful of chords, almost apocalyptic-folk in its pacing, carries the piece on its own, accompanied by sighs and a few piano touches. And so it goes until the closing "Skyward With Motion", the record's most radical episode, an ambient-noise piece that stretches out for over eight minutes before giving way to an organ and then, as scripted, to silence.

The follow-up, A Stable Reference ("Album of the Year" for many magazines in England), enriches the formula with vaguely gothic melodic effects and more pronounced rhythmic patterns, helped along by the addition of bassist Bobby Donne. With many of the rough edges smoothed out, the trio's music becomes less layered and quieter. At times it echoes the main theme of "Twin Peaks".

On the self-titled Labradford (1996) that followed, a new feat is achieved: psychedelia, industrial music and ambient are blended by the Richmond band through the mood of their own time, resulting in something new and unexpected.

The intent is announced right from the beautiful cover art, where those metal pillars, perhaps a conveyor belt, appear blurred, like the dreamlike image of a distant memory about to fade away to make room for waking life. And indeed it's anaemic steel noises that open the record, introducing "Phantom Channel Crossing". Pebbles and chains dragging slowly as if carried by a cosmic wind, generated by dark analogue electronics. "Midrange", by contrast, spreads out over more conventional harmonic territory, but above all makes room for melody and singing, both entirely absent from the preceding nightmare.

The sense of pain and desolation rises to almost religious levels on the following "Pico". A bass that sounds like the ticking of a pendulum clock precedes the entrance of a chant-like organ theme, and above all of a voice that seems to be reciting a prayer, as if decreeing the eternal rest of a lost civilisation. Keeping time, as ever, are metronomic, unperturbed clock ticks.

"The Cipher" is another nightmare of psychological devastation, amid intergalactic hisses and synthetic palpitations. The long procession of "Lake Speed" again leans on the organ to express a sense of martyrdom, accompanied by intermittent dissonance. Slowing everything down are a listless guitar and an apathetic bass, together setting the pace of this deformed march.

Dissonance is the true protagonist of the following "Scenic Recovery", and by the time you reach the closing "Battered", you're exhausted but also enthralled by the journey, just in time to appreciate yet another masterpiece, a fitting final testament to an unrepeatable record. A tremulous guitar invades your perception with its shapeless sound, the keyboard following the same intent, creeping in so delicately you barely notice its arrival. A quartz clock makes its presence felt now and then, while the voice drowns and dissolves, by now liquefied, into this endless play of fade-outs. Suddenly everything stops, making way for a languid guitar-bass-drums interplay of clear post-rock inspiration, which accompanies the listener to the end of the record.

The album established Labradford as a leading band of the new American instrumental rock, helped along too by a decent amount of hype.

Mi Media Naranja, an almost entirely instrumental record, continues the band's move away from their more rock-oriented references. And the recent "E Luxo So", melodic and evanescent to the point of inducing a kind of dreamlike trance in the listener, stands as the compendium of their body of work, with all its merits and flaws. It can be regarded as the ideal manifesto of this sort of "cosmic post-rock". But it can also come across as the crystallisation, bordering on mannerism, of a style that at times sacrifices emotion to a vortex of loops, samplers and cosmic trances.

In 2001 Labradford released the EP Fixed::Context, four tracks of pure ambient-post-rock, starting with the opener "Twenty", eighteen minutes of a slow, noisy digression, by turns silent and unsettling. Similarly, the closing "Wien" retains that air of mild emotional tension typical of the group, while the two middle tracks reveal Labradford's quieter side.

Mark Nelson later also launched the Pan American project.

Contributions by Michele Mininni (“Labradford”)

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