Roly Porter - Kistvaen (Subtext, 2020)
Continuing my interest in deep archæological time & myth manifesting in modern works in drone, this album immediately came to mind as I was listening to the recent One Leg One Eye release. Roly Porter, perhaps to some still famed as half of the foundational dubstep duo Vex'd, has since worked to define (with label mates Emptyset & Paul Jebanasam) the powerfully cinematic modern classical, electro-acoustic, dark ambient/drone sound of the Subtext label. All of his releases have been excellent, but Kistvaen is absolutely his most emotive and, perhaps literally, grounded work.
Kistvaen (c.f. Welsh cist-faen, cist "chest" + maen "stone") are submerged late neolithic to bronze age stone tombs commonly within cairn circles, or bowl barrows, a kind of tumulus or burial mound; the reference point for this album are the Dartmoor kistvaens in Devon, SW England, but the name has been extended by archæeolgists to numerous similar burials throughout Europe. Importantly, the Dartmoor kistvaens seem to orientated so that the buried were looking towards the sun. Here Roly here distills the approach from his previous albums into a focused, strongly emotional journey. Right off the bat the album turns away from his previously interstellar themes to the grounded, harrowing, universal sorrow of death and burial, starting with an absolutely channeled funerary keen done in extended vocal technique by one of the album's three vocal collaborators, per release "Mary-Anne Roberts – from medieval Welsh music duo Bragod, Ellen Southern – of Bristol's Dead Space Chamber Music group, and Phil Owen – a singer and researcher in vocal traditions". Yet by the track "Inflation Field" it becomes clear that the kistvaen is a portal to astral realms. In vision it is a simple staring up to the stars to seek solace from the immeasurable depths of death, but on further gaze a "Passage" through realms of consciousness, explicitly intent on universality, a bold attempt at synthesizing prehistoric notions of spirituality with modern physics. More than anything it is a sonic monument, invoked with transcendent instrumental, synthetic, and vocal tones over immersive hammered-stone field recordings, here to remind us of the continued universality of the fundamental experiences of death and grief that no amount of technological æther can dissociate us from. The stars are always above and the ground will always be below, yet in space there is no direction.
