CAUGHT IN THE WAKE FOREVER - The Places Where I Worship You

From Hibernate to Dronarvim by way of Mini50, all within less than three years. The rapid rise of Fraser Alexander McGowan as the new young star of contemporary ambient music is certainly justified, at the very least, by the quality of his debut album, "Against A Simple Wooden Cross", a small yet moving gem built on ethereal, bucolic drones. To this day, it's still that first work where the Caught In The Wake Forever moniker expressed the most effective essence of his poetics.

The project's trajectory has since headed toward abstraction. It's been a constant process, one that this new album, “The Places Where I Worship You”, brings to full completion: no more contact with solid ground, the new landscape is made up entirely of mental spaces. Even emotion undergoes a rebalancing process so thorough that its tensions are nullified, effectively excluding it from the equation. Here we're in the realm of isolationism taken to its most extreme consequences, right up to the dissolution of object into subject, and thus the loss of the subject itself and its activity.

In some ways reminiscent of Illuha's “Akari” – although their Apollonian dimension remained firmly anchored to perception – this record, by its very nature, tends toward a hermeticism that inhibits any possibility of experiencing it. And this despite the fact that the album was born out of inspiration from the natural landscapes of the Isle of Arran, with many of its sounds being reworkings of field recordings made on location. We find ourselves immersed in a lake of sonic traces on “On Locranza Shore”, scratched by the grainy noise debris of “Sun Downing”, surrounded on all sides by the hums of “Your Absent Breath”.

Yet everything seems empty, elusive, inanimate, analogous. Fascinating, yes, but for what is missing and being sought, not for what is there and can be perceived. Even the radio signals disrupting the Niblock-esque drone of “Often Nowhere” and the underwater dub movements of “Wreaths” seem to be the product of passive, uncaused forces. The sole exception is “Our Own Loch View”, where the “you” to whom the album is dedicated, implicitly invoked, finally seems to take on the features of a living being. With the same subtractive attitude with which Thomas Köner has photographed the external, earthly world at its lifeless extremes, McGowan captures interiority in a state of total tensionlessness.

A commendable and conceptually successful operation, but one that musically pays the price of the monotony inherent (it's almost pointless to point it out!) in the scenario it describes. Along with the impossibility of "making perceptible" through music something that is, by its very nature, imperceptible.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

19/04/2015