Crush Depth

Third item we’ve heard now from the Welsh dark droner Llyn Y Cwn, real name Benjamin Ian Powell. For Du Y Moroedd (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR302CD) he’s inspired by the sea, where former releases surveyed the mountainous landscapes of Wales, and also a Victorian slate mine. He’s also getting somewhat more “scientific”, because parts of this album were done using multibeam sonar when he was onboard a research vessel; this sonar isn’t a musical instrument of course, but it uses “acoustic reflections” to create human-readable images of the ocean floor.

Evidently what he has seen and heard has stirred the imagination of our man Powell, as he wistfully rhapsodises over finding shipwrecks that are over 100 years old. On another voyage tossing about on one of his research vessels, there was a “sound trap” attached to the anchor, which seems to have fetched back field recordings of great depth and import, including some evocative bells and foghorns in among the ever-present ocean swells. Whatever his methods, the music of Llyn Y Cwn always ends up as heavily processed dark ambient music with tremendous atmosphere, yet unlike a lot of droney types there’s always a palpable sense of something very real and physical underpinning it. This is undoubtedly because Powell has physically gone to the places he wishes to portray, rather than creating imaginative renditions of them in the studio; labelmate Tunnels Of Ah, for instance, does often convey the sense of being underground in a claustrophobic space, but I’m fairly sure he never visited a hydrocaust to make his recordings.

The nine shorter tracks at the start of the record are very easily read as a story of sea-faring and diving below in a submarine, portraying many emotional and mental states ranging from awestruck wonder to sheer terror as one descends in the bathysphere to explore among the flots. The final cut at the end, ‘Stratigraphy’, comes in at 31:36 minutes, and while its title – referring to a geological term for the study of layers of rock – may seem at odds with the ocean-going theme, it’s an essential part of the album, almost summarising all the preceding content and restating it as a grand mini-symphony, with much drama expressed by stark contrasts of volume and changing moods. In all, it successfully conveys the mystery and fear of “The Black Of The Sea”, which is how the title translates from Welsh.

As is customary, Powell’s high-contrast and densely etched photographs are printed across all six panels of the digipak. From 4th March 2022.