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loscil — Monument Builders (Kranky)

Photo by Mark Mushet

2016 has been a tough year for so many of us that at this point saying it’s been a bad one is practically a cliche. Canadian ambient master Scott Morgan, aka loscil, knows this as well as anyone (he unfortunately started the year with the kind of keen reminder of mortality that 2016 would go on to provide music fans with again and again). Unsurprisingly grappling with issues of mortality has lead Morgan to some darker influences on his newest loscil LP, from the darkly cynical philosophies of John Gray to the raw, moving, post-civilization imagery of Edward Burtynsky (also an influence on Morgan’s excellently and fittingly stark photography). There are two surprises on Monument Builders, though: the first is that Morgan comes away from this with an album that’s one of stubborn optimism and even joie de vivre in the face of everything that 2016 has thrown at us all, and the second is that he does so in record time.

Like many acts working in the kind of realm loscil does, Morgan’s albums are usually lengthy affairs; before Monument Builders none of his LPs cracked the short side of the 50-minute mark. But here he makes a complete and significant statement in just seven songs over the course of less than 38 minutes — practically an EP by his standards. The likes of 2014’s sprawling, magisterial Sea Island made excellent use of that space, and the individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

And he wastes no time in doing so. “Drained Lake” begins the album with a beautifully foggy fade-in perfectly in keeping with what you might want from a loscil song. Soon enough, though, its ghostly tones (drawn from the sample-based instruments, field recordings, and samples of things like kettles boiling that loscil loves and uses so well) are bolstered by an eruption of a chattering, stuttering sound from an old microcassette recorder. As with seemingly every element Morgan chooses to add to the loscil repertoire, from unorthodox drones to acoustic instruments (here, often gorgeously mournful, decaying horn lines) to even vocals (once), the pulsing mechanical failure that animates the middle of “Drained Lake” feels perfectly natural, even as it gives this track an almost radically new cast. Following that up with the rough, pummeling, post-Carpenter synth loop that gives “Red Tide” a restless, anxious feeling totally new to the project is a clear indication of how unwilling Morgan is to rest on past laurels, even as this album still feels very much like loscil.

The beginning of the album builds to the climax at its chronological center, one named “Straw Dogs” after Gray’s most despairing book. Here the horns begin issuing out slowly like baying wolves, weaving together until the track builds to a drumroll-assisted crescendo, one of the few found in Morgan’s work. The tension in Monument Builders, embodied in the title’s multiple, often contradictory emotional resonances around the way humans work to transform the world in profound ways, often without thought, frequently in ways fated to long outlive us, has broken. The setting and sounds and these first four tracks have evoked the sadness and anxiety of mortality, climate change, human self-importance, and impermanence. As “Straw Dogs” is suddenly cut off, we’re left with a question; if you face down all of this, all of these ramifications and challenges, what now?

It’s telling that Morgan chooses to follow “Straw Dogs” with the saddest song on Monument Builders, but not because he or the album are succumbing to despair. “Deceiver” could almost be a dark sibling to the lush, pretty “Holding Pattern” from Sea Island, where the endlessly falling wash of sound seems to be leading to retreat. But then in the second half of the song Morgan introduces a new voice, one poignantly and a little hesitantly pulling back, away, and up from the comforting but maybe potentially stifling downward cast of the rest of “Deceiver.” The point is not that things are instantly okay or even that these problems are surmountable; the point is that, as Jason Molina once sang, “the real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try.” If loscil’s music, here or in general, is making a kind of existential point, it’s that even if you buy Gray’s anti-humanists arguments about the pointlessness of it all, you can look around at this world and decide to live and work and keep going and make things better, however you can. There’s a skyscraper on the cover of Monument Builders but in the end our lives, the impact of our lives, make all of us the real referents of the title. Those builders aren’t a rarified group erecting massive physical buildings; they are all of us, and the monument is human existence.

And so Monument Builders ends with one of the most striking and harshly beautiful tracks Morgan has ever made, and he calls it “Weeds.” After a few minutes a succession of flickering, almost voice-like tones start enveloping the song, eventually becoming subsumed under a shuddering, shimmering element that sounds almost like the track is shaking apart into fragments of light. It’s a final benediction, in the name of the kind of natural life we never seem to be able to fully stamp out, whether we drain lakes or construct towers or spray lawns. A sign that we will continue, no matter who we mourn or elect or fight or work with along the way.

Ian Mathers

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