House of Low Culture - Edward's Lament
Aaron Turner's House of Low Culture haunts the periphery of perception. His second disc, Edward's Lament, manifests itself like a nearly invisible mist just at the threshold of existence. The four major parts of this record are atmospheres of dis-ease, filled with hints of primal awakening and the decay of once-organic possibilities. The House of Low Culture is the last stop between life and death -- all is doubtful, all is mysterious. The Edward of the title might be Dr. Edward Jessup, one-time candidate for the Nobel Prize who conducted sensory deprivation experiments on himself (the subject of the film Altered States). Turner isn't saying, though there are enough hints in the spectral darkness of these miniscule experimental soundtracks to lead one to surmise that these nine songs are a rendition of the unconscious music heard by Jessup while in the psychotropic blankness of the tank.
"Edward's Intent" grows from darkness into a spectral landscape of ghostly bird noises and the movement of tiny creatures in the night. Over the course of 13 minutes, this sepulchural atmosphere fills with enough ghosts that their tiny chirps and squeaks become human voices and the lamentation grows into a ghostly choir shivering in the frigid electronic atmosphere. "Intrmssn_A" erupts with a wail of guitar noise, a block of sound which is abruptly silenced and we are then left with the fading echo of this guitar sound across the ghostly landscape.
An acoustic guitar strums its way through "On the Upswing" like a wandering minstrel and the ghosts it pulls out of the imaginary landscape are the haunts of native shamans whose howls are garbled as if they have been underwater for centuries. Or maybe this is Edward's voice from the depth of the sensory deprivation chamber, his head back too far in the water. "...And Now The Man You've All Been Waiting For!" is an exercise in holding one's breath as tones drift back towards the end of infinity and pause there, waiting for you. There is nothing but blackness bleeding around the edges and it creeps towards you during the near twenty minute duration of this excursion in minimal minimalism.
As for musical landmarks in this desolate terrain of partially submerged consciousness there are breaths of Labradford, Scenic and Ennio Morricone's sparse spagetti western soundtracks as well as glitch and microsound hints of the Raster-Noton and 12k labels. Turner's experiments with the House of Low Culture are like soundtrack music to accompany a journey to the Wild West by means of hypnotic regression techniques and massive amounts of LSD. The title track, "Edward's Lament," has the closest thing to recognizable guitar melody -- a scuffed-up, dirty twang which slouches across your aural filed as if it were lame. The dust devils and spectral vultures which trail after the melody are transparent, ghostly images which seem more like false frames sketched in by your imagination than real objects. The final track, "Thank You, And Good Night" almost sounds like a lonely guitar being plucked from a backporch under a rain-touched sky, but it all happens at such distance from the listener that it sounds like there is a veil of time and space between us.
Edward's Lament is an extremely haunted record, a sparse elegy for empty space that almost requires listening from the solitude of a sensory deprivation tank to really hear. It is a record of a mental trip, an internal excursion buoyed by the weight of thought and primal possibilities. It is full of ghosts -- the genetic noise of our evolutionary past -- and yet, with the final wistful notes of "Thank You, And Good Night," it becomes a paean to what we may still become. Spooky and beautiful.
Neurot Recordings [2003]
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