Loscil – Endless Falls

1. Endless Falls
2. Estuarine
3. Shallow Water Blackout
4. Dub for Cascadia
5. Fern and Robin
6. Lake Orchard
7. Showers of Ink
8. The Making of Grief Point
 
Nature: the beast. Nature: the mother which suckles us all. Its dualism has served as a muse for artists throughout history, none more so than the death and sex obsessed Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries. To them, the unfettered power of nature was the ultimate, most transcendental aesthetic experience.
 
But now time has passed and such ideas seem pretentious and ridiculous in our world of iphones and warm homes. Yet artists like Loscil aka Scott Morgan still find inspiration in what humanity has dedicated all its time and money into taming.
 
From the rain spattered car window of the front cover (picture courtesy of Morgan’s nursery-aged daughter) to the soft droning and sparse, organic rhythms of the eight tracks, ‘Endless Falls’ is a tour de force of understated ambient music, perfectly raising the scent of rain falling on moist spring earth and bruised clouds looming overhead. But in Morgan’s world nature isn’t as brutal or powerful as it was for the Romantics. No, Morgan’s nature is viewed from behind windows or experienced at its gentlest, probably in a kids playground. This doesn’t detract from the album’s sonics although there could have been some more prominent rhythms to keep its pulse from lapsing, as it does, into subdued moroseness. As it stands though, ‘Endless Falls’ is a pensive and highly atmospheric Sunday afternoon record which demands to be heard by all who find a strange peace in those gentle drizzly days.
 
Review by Liam McLaughlin
‘Endless Falls’ will be released on 1st March on Kranky Records