Llyn Y Cwn
Megaliths
UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR334CD (2024)
This is Ben Powell who continues to develop his own unique take on the dark ambient drone, always producing works very closely linked to the landscape – caves, mountains, quarries, and the ocean, often privileging the Welsh landscape.
Here he turns his skills to the theme of ancient stone monuments, all named on the back cover, and again mostly Welsh – but he does make a concession to the UK with his ‘Avebury’ cut, naming one of the most popular such sites after Stonehenge, and also Ireland (Cashelkeelty) and Scotland (Machrie Moor). He collected ambient recordings from around the sites – and inside them, if there was a burial chamber that could be entered and explored – and now offers us these highly-processed results, along with his familiar high-contrast photo images on the six-panel digipak. The press notes stress such key words as “mysticism”, “ghostly”, and “ritual”, such tropes being inevitable I suppose when we try and account for these monuments, whose purpose and meaning continue to be the subject of disputation. The work of Julian Cope is also namechecked.
While I find I am running out of new things to say about Llyn Y Cwn, I continue to enjoy these very solemn and ultra-minimal sounds he makes; the severity of his records may reflect something of his personality. (12/04/2024)