Loscil – Endless Falls

Since 1999, Loscil (aka Scott Morgan) has been making the kind of dreamy, pleas­antly rain-soaked ambient music that might draw imme­diate com­par­isons to genre greats like Elu­vium, Bios­phere, and Stars of the Lid. Drones, field record­ings, and looped, nearly sub­lim­inal per­cus­sion all figure into Loscil’s soundscapes—an ideal mélange, I’ve found, for writing and writing, among other med­i­ta­tive activities.

In his day job, Morgan is the drummer for much-loved Van­couver indie band Destroyer—something you’d never guess from lis­tening to his work as Loscil, and some­thing I never would have known if it weren’t for a guest-starring turn from Destroyer’s leading man Dan Bejar on the closing spoken-word track of the new album, End­less Falls.

But let’s back up a bit. In truth, my first expo­sure to Loscil came from the indie puzzle game Osmos. A seam­less aes­thetic expe­ri­ence, the game melds beau­tiful visuals with absorbing sounds as the player guides a “mote” around a level filled with other motes, trying to con­sume smaller ones and avoid being swal­lowed by larger ones. The con­cep­tual focus on con­ser­va­tion of momentum isn’t at all out of line with Morgan’s own musical goals. Osmos is a bril­liant piece of game design, and the music (both by Loscil and other promi­nent ambient artists) fits per­fectly there. Buy it. Play it. It’s cheap!

Morgan’s newest album is a fur­ther evo­lu­tion of the sound he devel­oped on ear­lier works like First Nar­rows, Stases, and Plume. The record begins and ends with the sound of rain—perhaps an overused trope in the genre, but per­fectly imple­mented and seem­ingly fresh here. The warmth of Loscil’s recent albums has cooled a little here, despite a title track that opens things with atmos­pheric strings over a soft drone. These strings are prob­ably the most ani­mated and most sen­ti­mental ele­ment on End­less Falls—at times even reminding me of Trevor Jones’ won­derful but not exactly reserved work on The Last of the Mohi­cans’ soundtrack—giving some early emo­tional heft to a col­lec­tion that might oth­er­wise seem dis­tant. “Estu­arine” fol­lows, bringing in back­ground piano fig­ures and a shuf­fling beat surely made by the “looping oscil­lator” func­tion in Csound that gives the Loscil project its name. The middle sec­tion of the album, par­tic­u­larly “Shallow Water Blackout,” “Fern and Robin,” and “Lake Orchard,” are quiet in the extreme, while the last two songs up the inten­sity level a little.

The penul­ti­mate track, “Showers of Ink” fea­tures inter­twining bells and elec­tronic sounds that recall the beau­tiful Van­gelis score for Blade Runner—long a per­sonal favorite of mine. “The Making of Grief Point” puts an inter­esting and sur­prising excla­ma­tion point on End­less Falls, fea­turing Bejar’s stream-of-consciousness monologue—poetic, ellip­tical, his voice occa­sion­ally trip­ping over itself, but full of cut­ting lines that make you laugh out of nowhere—over a per­sis­tent, clip­ping beat (almost fit for a micro­house track) and washes of piano and strings. The lyrics con­cern an imag­i­nary album called Grief Point, and the per­sonal and polit­ical tur­bu­lence involved in cre­ating it. While the meaning is never pre­cisely clear, the col­lec­tive feeling of the words fits the omi­nous and med­i­ta­tive music like a glove.

Loscil — “Showers of Ink”

End­less Falls dropped on March 1^st on the ven­er­able Kranky label. You can buy it here or here.