We’ve heard from Aperus a couple of times previously – very atmospheric records from Santa Fe made with a curious mix of field recordings, weather recordings, electronics, and ambient captures from the ether. Aperus is solo project of Brian McWilliams, who’s here again today as one half of Remanence, a collaborative project with John Phipps.
Active since 1995 they managed to release but five albums over 28 years, starting out with a cassette called Premonition, but it seems Sepiadrone (RESONANT EFFECTS RFXCD03) might be their last gasp. Where Aperus is very focussed on evoking a sense of place, Remanence seems to be more of a musical / performance / recording thing, involving guitars, samples, synths, and objects, with the emphasis on very profound transformations of their source materials, and a sense that they’re working and exploring together right there in the room and very much in the moment (unlike say one of those situations where the recording artists don’t actually meet up and simply swap soundfiles across continents). One of them even kept a diary as they were making this record, and there’s a short excerpt printed here on the press release – indicating that marbles and rocks are every bit as important to them as guitars and drums, and the elusive thrill they’re both seeking is is to do with actions such as vibrating, dragging and rolling their objects around.
That’s only the start of the day’s work, which continues naturally into turning on the samplers and building loops, then pushing the sounds into effects boxes and workstations (one of them, called Alchemy, is apparently capable of a “morphing” action, involving glorping together any number of unrelated sounds). Plus field recordings from nature also get layered into this enticing array. The other side of the Remanence plan is the visual dimension, and there’s not only the outsize card wallet cover art, but also a tracing-paper envelope filled with art postcards in full colour. These visuals reflect the duo’s concern with “recordings as tangible objects”, and though they may stop short of inviting us to regard the package as an art exhibit, they make plain their allegiance to specific visual antecedents by Russell Mills, Zoviet France, and Vaughan Oliver – the UK graphic designer strongly associated with 4AD covers and designs since 1983.
Sepiadrone emerges as a very superior form of layered drone music within the loose “ambient” genre, but our two explorers evidently share a vision about something more profound and intangible – it’s to do with the vibrations of the universe and a key tone that might be holding everything in the cosmos together. At least, that’s my take on the printed quote from F. Sievers which is provided here. Further hints can be gleaned from the suggestive track titles, which allude to forces buried underground, sentinels watching us from above, clouds made of metal, and all-purpose rituals in which any acolyte who hears the call can immerse themselves. I’m enjoying these all-encompassing and richly-layered episodes, but somehow everything feels a shade less purposeful than the Aperus records, which are quite vivid realisations of specific locations, in comparison to these impressionistic crawlers. Even so, there’s a lot of (very subtle) variety across these 11 cuts, and if heard while contemplating the ambiguous colour artworks, may induce the hoped-for transcendent state in the listener. Mastered by Robin Storey, a personal hero of McWilliams. From 12 April 2023.
Further reading:
Weather Anomalies
Archaic Signal