People do all sorts of things to celebrate milestones in their lives; to mark 50 years, Scott Morgan drove into the mountains and found fire. That wasn’t so much the intent of the journey as it was an unavoidable consequence of the current state of the world, with the periodically omnipresent haze of our yearly wildfires even showing up on the cover of Lake Fire (a picture taken by Morgan himself on the trip). Morgan’s 12th LP on kranky as loscil started very differently, only going through a course of destruction and regrowth after that experience.
loscil records often engage deeply with facets of the natural world: the ocean, the landscape, the light; the technology, the science, the architecture we bring to bear on it. Sometimes these concerns are reflected in or even grow out of Morgan’s methodology for each project. Here he originally worked with an ensemble (of whom only James Meager’s double bass on “Ash Clouds” remains in direct form), only to take those tracks in a new direction through an “overpainting” process of sculpting and remixing. The result has this in common with the technique he used on 2021’s Clara: without reading up on the background you might be hard pressed to label exactly what’s going on here, but that context still colors the overall sonic and emotional range, scale, and tones of the albums.
For Lake Fire (a general descriptor for the naming convention used for the conflagrations surrounding Morgan in the wilderness), that includes a certain foreboding tension notable even in a discography not exactly lacking that element. More droning tracks like the shuddering, radiant “Silos” or the enveloping “Ash Clouds” feel like you’re in the midst of something potentially perilous. Elsewhere a ghostly horn-like element over the patient cadence of “Spark” or traces of piano dancing above the diffuse background of “Candling” provide the faint relief of a way through the murky surroundings. If other loscil albums have brought the alien or remote into close focus, here the opposite occurs: the natural world rendered as alien landscape.
The opening and closing statements are the most striking examples of that shift. The dubby “Arrhythmia” quickly locks into a measured, cycling sense of propulsion and pressure that in the context of Morgan’s work feels almost frantic, layering on urgency until it seems like the track is fleeing something. The title track builds steadily, hissing and seething, curling into an eventual roaring climax before dying back into nothing. Whatever combustible elements were involved, they’ve been consumed. Now we just wait for the smoke to clear and see what grows in its place.
Watch how the clouds sometimes punch through to a higher layer in the atmosphere - that’s the part where it becomes a “pyrocumulus”, the cloud is going so high under its own energy that it begins condensing water and forming a normal water cloud.
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Timelapse of the#pyrocumulus cloud from the #lakefire north of Los Angeles
Some photos from The Atlantic. According to ABC7 (local California):
The Lake Fire exploded in size in a matter of hours and charred 10,500 acres amid hot temperatures after it was reported Wednesday at about 3:45 p.m. near the intersection of North Lake Hughes Road and Pine Canyon Road, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Flames raced across ridges and steep slopes, including in some areas that had not burned since 1968, fire officials said. By Thursday morning, the blaze had consumed nearly 16.5 square miles (42 square kilometers) of timber and brush. There was no containment.
By Thursday afternoon, the blaze was still at 0% containment, but firefighters were hoping to take make further progress ahead of a major heat wave expected over the weekend.
Of course, as seems to be par for the course lately, this fire has generated its own “firenado” or “fire tornado.” Anybody who has any doubt that we are in such deep shit with the climate and catastrophes such as this should watch this and tell me that all is cool. Lie.
From California’s Fast-Moving Lake Fire, one of 21 photos. A burned vehicle is seen as wind whips embers from a tree burned by the Lake Fire in Angeles National Forest on August 13, 2020, north of Santa Clarita, California. (Ringo H.W. Chiu / AP)
We’ve had very polluted skies from wildfires in Frazier Park for the past couple of weeks. The massive wildfire in nearby Lake Hughes has been the main reason for the poor air quality, and then another fire was set in Lake Piru in Ventura County. This fire was officially 100% contained on Saturday.
Yesterday there was still smoke in the air, but this morning it was as if there had never been a fire. The Earth cleans itself up quickly through its natural orgone energy and we have an extensive orgonite grid throughout LA, Ventura, and Kern Counties. This means that as long as there is no more pollution being added, the sky cleans up almost immediately. This is the same effect OR has on smog and chemtrails. The top photo was looking west on Wed. August 19, and the bottom was this morning, August 24. This is the first day we’ve had crystal clear skies, although all the while the fires were burning, we still had OR clouds and a total lack of “planes.”
Very hot temperatures combined with low humidity and wind gusts up to 40 mph made conditions favorable for fire ignition and rapid fire spread. While there were no red flag warnings up for Southern California, the Lake Fire in Los Angeles County continued to burn. As of Friday morning, that fire covered 11,000 acres and was 12 percent contained. In Colorado, the Pine Gulf Fire north of Grand Junction grew to 73,381 acres making it the fourth largest fire in Colorado history. The intense heat ramping up across the West comes on the heels of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) releasing its July monthly climate report on Thursday stating that July 2020 was the second hottest July on record for the planet, and the #1 hottest on record for the Northern Hemisphere. It also stated that arctic sea ice reached record lows. Globally, 2020 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record.
Kathryn Prociv, 'Sweltering heat triggers power outages across California', NBC News
