- Two ambient music heavyweights turn the pipe organ into otherworldly manna on this new LP for Kranky.
- Colours Of Air, the new album from Loscil and Lawrence English, can seem a bit conservative on first listen. It's not the first ambient album to be made on a pipe organ (it's not even the first by English to be made on a pipe organ), nor is it the first inspired by colours or even by air. It sounds pretty much exactly like the midpoint between a Loscil and a Lawrence English record—simpler and more streamlined than most of Loscil's work, livelier and more texturally rich than most of English's. It might seem a little old-fashioned compared to the urgent and intensely personal visions of millennial ambient artists like Claire Rousay or Patrick Shiroishi. Yet the way the two artists subtly upend expectations gives Colours Of Air a certain vivacity.
For one, no ambient pipe organ album has ever sounded quite like this. At first, you probably wouldn't guess that an instrument over a century old was the source of many of these sounds, but it's clear even from the first second of "Cyan" how much thicker and more magisterial these drones are than your average synth-pad cushions. The Bandcamp notes cite a conversation about "rich sources" for electronic music as a starting point for this music, and the throb and grandeur of the organ permeates each of these eight tracks, sometimes undergirded by a subterranean-sounding kick drum. Loscil and Lawrence English aren't interested in caressing the organ for the particular quirks of its sound, instead distorting it beyond recognition while preserving as much of its essential character as possible.
The pipe organ tends to conjure associations with Christian liturgy in ambient music. The work of Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, and Tim Hecker can't help but sound sacred, especially since pipe organs tend to be found in churches. Colours Of Air conjures no such imagery, and it's appropriate that the instrument the duo used is housed not in a church but the Old Museum in English's hometown of Brisbane, Australia. Nor is there anything "old-sounding" about this album that would give away the organ's 136 years. Resolutely hi-fi and fearsomely blank, this music resembles the featureless grandeur of the Rothko Chapel much more than the gables of a Gothic church.
Each piece is named for a colour, and the way colours correspond to a track's mood is another point of interest. Shades of red are portrayed as threatening. "Pink" subsumes a fearsome two-note theme into a grand drone with a cello-like low end, and "Magenta" shrieks like a threnody. "Black" is predictably brooding, but "Cyan" and "Aqua," two colours almost identical to the naked eye, exist at tonal poles: the former rich and brooding, the latter serrated and urgent. The unexplained rationale adds a layer of intrigue, even a subtle streak of humor, to this music. Could "Grey" be inspired by the manga of that name, inspiration for English's album Approach from last year?
Questions like these bubble up upon diving into the depths of Colours Of Air. One of the thrills of listening to this record is how its initially predictable veneer fades on subsequent listens to reveal layers of mischief underneath. It'd be a stretch to call this music "loose," but the two are having fun here, and the colour-based structure gives them the opportunity to literally paint in new hues. You can imagine their excitement as they get to work imagining what "Yellow" sounds like (the answer: a playful, slightly ominous sea of squiggles that hints at the bent synthscapes of a Boards Of Canada interlude). This is an album about possibilities rather than parameters, and it's a highlight in both artists' recent catalogs.
Tracklist01. Cyan
02. Aqua
03. Yellow
04. Grey
05. Black
06. Pink
07. Violet
08. Magenta