L'ombre - Medicine For The Meaningless
As a label, Ant-Zen is consistent. As a listener, you know what you're going to get from an Ant-Zen release, and I don't say this in a bad way -- I'm a huge fan of the music which comes out of the Anthill -- but I approach their releases with an awareness of what I'm going to hear. The real trick is when they pop something into my head which makes me wonder if all the rules have changed. L'ombre's Medicine for the Meaningless challenges every other act on the Ant-Zen roster to graduate themselves to the next level of complexity or be left behind. Not a bad trick for a newcomer.
In this case, one Stephen Sawyer, resident of Canada. Operating with the mantra of "...behind all that exists there is shadow," Sawyer disappears into L'ombre and delivers an hour of rhythmic ambient music which is equally claustrophobic and aurally expansive. Medicine for the Meaningless opens with "Nowhere," a winter wind howling across empty moors. Somewhere just beyond a hillock or copse of broken trees is a tiny shed with gaping holes in the walls and ceilings so that the wind can toy with an abandoned piano that has been left there. Call this "Fugue for Wind and Piano," "Nowhere" scours clean your mental landscapes as the wind fills your head and the oddly arrhythmic piano melody captivates your lung sacks until you find yourself holding your breath, waiting for the next note to find its way through the wind.
The song titles are landmarks of desolation. "Disappear" continues the reluctant melody of "Nowhere," adding rhythmic noise patterns to a steady tonal melody. Heavy washes of sound breathe in and out around the listener. To disappear is to have your identity subsumed under the weight of the sound. All that remains is the melancholic melody which, like a pterodactyl trapped on the surface of a tar pit, is slowly being dragged under by the fields of noise rising around it. "Ressentiment" [sic] follows this bird-creature down under the black surface, slow bubbles of trapped gases rise past it as it sluggishly falls towards the black bottom. Imagine the building pressure as the weight of the surface increases overhead, imagine the hissing sound in your ears as they start to bleed, imagine the force exerting itself against your heart as you struggle to breath.
"On the Beach" echoes Nevil Shute's apocalyptic book of the same name. Restless beats scamper around the processed sound of waves breaking on the shore. Global wind patterns are bringing nuclear fallout to the shore. All you can do is wait, and the waiting starts to get under your skin after awhile. You start to get edgy and restless. After the Nietzschean "God is Dead!" rumble of "Atheist," L'ombre takes us on a pharmaceutical ride with "Syzygy," a mental flight on beat-paths laid out through the throb and click of celestial space.
The last track, "Trailblazer," wanders into silence as those records which want to hide a bonus track do, but in L'ombre's case, the silence works as part of the experience. Melding equal parts Gridlock and Tarmvred, Sawyer has taken the best parts of rhythmic ambient and noisy IDM which the last few years have offered and gone off in his own direction. We're just following his lead and, for a few minutes in the middle of "Trailblazer" we are lost, surrounded by silence. Finally he calls us on again, lost from view but still somewhere ahead. Medicine for the Meaningless is a fabulous debut, a record which all of 2003 will be hard pressed to match.
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