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.
