The album by 400 Lonely Things is a little out of my line, but a lot of depth and a lot of honesty have fed into its teeming layers of synthetic drone, dark ambience, spoken-word fragments and mist-swirling nostalgia. Mother Moon (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR319CD) appears to be a solo act of Craig Varian, although the band started life as a duo with Jonathan McCall, and they began making records in 2003, many of them on the Pimalia label.
The sampling and collage approach was there from the start, so I’m unsurprised to learn they had a split release with Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, who are broadly in the same zone – treated tapes and effects to produce a patina of antique distressing and a nostalgic tint to every sound. In this instance, 400 Lonely Things is getting nostalgic for the Banning Mill mansion in Georgia, and it’s not just nostalgia for a certain location, or a certain building, but I think for a time and a place which Varian wishes they could have experienced. After it had finished its life as a paper mill, the Banning mansion – located in a rather obscure location – became something of a magnet to post-1960s hippies, and through the 1970s right up to the 1990s it was a haven for many social outcasts – artists, rebel intellectuals, college dropouts, and gays and drag queens who were unlikely to find a warm welcome anywhere else in that part of southern America. The Minotauress painting you can see on the cover here was installed at Banning Mill; it was painted (around 1973, some say) by Richard Scott Hill, and Craig Varian was evidently deeply moved by seeing it.
You might say the whole album here stems from that one image, but it’s also a portrait of the mansion itself, its decaying walls and faded furnishings, and an imaginative take on the things that transpired inside those walls. “Undercurrents of mania and depression,” is how the press note describes it, suggesting Banning Mill was the kind of remote colony apt to appeal to disaffected souls of a certain turn of mind. But the music is far from melodramatic or lurid, nor does it incline towards the kind of occultist sensationalism that Coil might have opted for, if attempting the same theme. Instead, it’s delicate and wispy music, full of impossible longing, longing for a memory they were born too late to even experience, and a balm for the truly poetic and romantic spirit.
It remains to mention William Basinski, who produced this album comprised of recordings made between 2017 and 2021; this genius was the man who gave us Disintegration Loops in 2002 and 2003 after the World Trade Center attacks, and given his decision to dress as the poet Thomas Chatterton for the back cover of that album, his Romantic credentials and emotional empathy for a project like this are assured. I’ve enjoyed this strange and wispy music, but perhaps the only thing lacking from Mother Moon is a genuine sense of being rooted in a certain place, or time; instead it’s fantastical, verging on something unreal, an ethereal soap bubble of the mind. From 9th May 2023.