Back in November, Scott Morgan—the ambient musician and composer who records under the name Loscil—released Monument Builders, an album built around samples of sound captured around his creaking Vancouver home. There’s a duality of meaning behind that title. Yes, there is an overwhelming sense of entropy here that highlights the eventual futility of commemoration, whether physical or otherwise (the problem, shorter: we’re all gonna die), but as Morgan immersed himself in the immense struggles of his friends and family, he found himself more struck by our innate ability to survive, a trait very much worth celebrating (the solution, shorter: so what?).
That said, the individual pieces that comprise Monument Builders don’t always tell so rounded a tale. That’s the case in “Deceiver,” whose video we’re premiering today. The track is led by sustained organ groans that find themselves refreshed just as they’re beginning to decay. Drops of piano appear like platelets, counter-melodies arise in a kind of aria to sing against the hum. Director aAron munson, who conceived of the “Deceiver” video as one in a series of short experimental films exploring depression, sends quiet, granular washes of white through deep maroon fields that feel alternately like moonscapes and deserts, galaxies and microscope samples. Even as the white spreads, seeming to move at will through the black, the instrumentation falls out, leaving only that original organ howl, which by the end of the track sounds resigned in its victory. A wave of black overwhelms the frame.
It’s a moving piece of work from the two artists, both in conception and in execution, exuding as it does the intoxicating perceived beauty of decay; as you might with a dying lily, you can’t help but lean in closer. Check it out below.
Monument Builders is out now on Kranky.
