Split cassette (bvlv6) sent to us by N.E. Trethowan from Tampere in Finland, on the Bivalve label.
Strange Fog is Ryan LaLiberty who provides four tracks under the heading Lighthouse Song. I never heard this Maine-based performer before, but I see he’s made a lot of solo releases, sometimes appearing as Colossus or Greywater. Back in 2008 he even appeared on a split with Locrian, the Chicago duo who used to regale us with their tapes of heavy amp distortion overlaid with Black Metal and Doom elements. Strange Fog has very little “darkness” in his overall vision though, instead proposing many gentle and wistful episodes on these Lighthouse Song tracks, which may connect up into a larger story (which includes being lost at sea by the end of the suite). Part of his approach is to weave his slightly melancholy songs into the ambient droney guitar textures, so he’s not 100% “abstract”. It’s tempting to align this with the “shoegaze dreampop” music of Bipolar Explorer, but there’s no real connection. Lighthouse Song may contain a message about a very human search for compassion and love, with LaLiberty’s proviso that it’s also important to “maintain distance and independence”. That sounds more like a warning you’d find on an online dating site than in the lyrics of a head-over-heels love song, but the point is well made. The music is played live and mostly improvised, using a lot of processing, loops, and echo; kind of like the fair-headed benign twin of Aidan Baker.
On Side B of the tape, Net turns in several short songs under the heading Werrit Mire. Net is an alias for Trethowan and he’s released at least five albums since 2017 under that name – in fact we noted Weta & Weta at the time (Jen praised the conviction with which he created and explored his microscopic worlds). All of these Werrit Mire tracks seem to have come from a very sensitive place – the creator speaks of “several difficult years” and intends this music as a form of catharsis to ease his sufferings. Where Strange Fog proscribes caution in affairs of the heart, Net bears the scars of several emotional battles, some of them hinting at depression and negativity. All he can do is cling to his ‘Violet Beetle’ – a song containing certain precious symbols that evoke memories of happier times and places. On other occasions, he clearly hopes he could just wish away the world and escape everything – hence ‘Machine for Hiding in’, which might be how he apprehends the equipment setup he uses.
To realise this highly personal album, the creator has applied his usual working methods often deployed to created soundscapes and ambient textures, and repurposed them into a form suitable for songwriting. The bass guitar and voice parts – the latter very whispery and anguished in tone – were added later, layered on top of these unusual, evocative sounds. When I say “songwriting”, given Trethowan’s highly individual approach to music production, we should not expect a conventional verse-chorus form, and instead these short pieces are very open-ended, ambiguous, and guided by free association.
I suppose if these two albums share any common ground, it’s the unusual melding of ambient with song form, although the label’s preferred term is “heartfelt slowcore and modular post-rock ambience”. 50 copies of the cassette, in a die-cut folded card wrapper, were released. From 29/07/2024.