LOSCIL - Monument Builders

The release of a new album by Canadian musician Scott Morgan, aka Loscil, is always an event eagerly awaited with huge expectations by lovers of contemporary electronic music. For his part, Loscil has never disappointed; over the last fifteen years, since his 2001 debut, he has consistently kept the quality bar set high. From the endless rains of "Endless Falls" to the masterpiece "Plume" (2006), from the extraordinary collaboration with Bvdub – "Erebus" (2013) – to the drone symphonies of "First Narrows" (2004), Loscil has always shown a great ability to depict environments and journeys, landscapes and atmospheres, often veiled by an oppressive sense of fatalism and nihilism.

If offended nature (rain, water, air, ice) had been the element that more than any other characterized Loscil's choices, this time there's a partial shift that further accentuates his fundamental distrust of the human race and the resulting pessimism toward its fate. "Monument Builders" has three fundamental inspirations, as Loscil himself has stated: the thinking of English philosopher John Gray, who for years has 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 ambitiously defying eternity while being destined to lose, the creator of a new geological era (the Anthropocene) likewise destined to vanish into nothing. This time the pessimism is almost absolute; it seems man is by definition incapable of exerting any positive influence on the world that hosts him. Loscil loads some tracks with tension, only to lose himself in others of pure post-cosmic nihilism.

"Drained Lake" sits halfway between ambient music and Mogwai-style electronics, while "Monument Builders" evokes the greyness of concrete, a cold instrument serving human megalomania, which would seem to be its only legacy. "Straw Dogs", named after one of John Gray's books, is wracked by anguished horns before the tension builds with obsessive percussion. "Anthropocene" and "Red Tide" are built on drones and compulsive post-techno rhythms, while "Deceiver", with its murky loop, represents the very bottom of the abyss.

Closing the album is "Weeds", perhaps its finest moment, very close to composer Philip Glass and comparable to the vocal experiments of Tim Hecker on "Love Streams" (2016); the pseudo-voices trying to emerge from the electronic depths could seem either post-human – new lives born after our disappearance – or the incomprehensible cries of de-evolved beings unable to articulate meaningful words, close to their own extinction, in a style reminiscent of Residents.

With "Monument Builders" Loscil's nihilism reaches a new level of awareness; the cold and darkness of concrete seem far more oppressive than those of the ice or rains of years past.

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12/12/2016