The first thing that strikes you is the extreme stereo panning. Soft fuzzy-edged notes bounce from left to right before the rhythmic pulsations shift into one another, merging into waves of sound that ebb and flow together. Following just a couple of months on from loscil’s split release with Fieldhead, ‘Sea Island’ provides a more expansive demonstration of Scott Mogan’s slowly unfurling soundscapes.
Slowly turning ambience drifts around softly rhythmic undulations on the majority of the tracks, which imperceptibly phase into one another . Elsewhere, as on ‘Bleeding Ink’, chimes eddy around insistent yet delicate throbs and (in)human vocals imbued with quasi-religious undertones. ‘Sea Island Murders’ brings darker rumblings and delicate dissonance to the textured layers that hover in mid-air, while sparse piano notes hang like building clouds over a valley in autumn.
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The transitions between the tracks are seamless, the moments of silence as integral to the listening experience and the progressions between moods and spaces as the sounds themselves. As such, ‘Sea Island’ is ideally best considered – and listened to – as a single piece that flows.
Hypnotic and richly atmospheric, elegant and at times beautifully melodic, ‘Sea Island’ is a triumph of subtlety and texture, an ambient album that actually holds the attention instead of simply fading into the background.
loscil Online
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