Cremation Lily — In England Now, Underwater
Fires Frame the Silhouette. That record was a collection of scorched tape noise and power electronics, which, it turned out, marked something of a watershed for Zen Zsigo's project. Subsequent releases on Zen's own Strange Rules label have turned towards deftly crafted techno and tape smudged ambiences. Also ramped up was the previously only hinted at sense of melancholy and nostalgia which began to form the central axis around which a very personal kind of electronic music was being made. The previous LP's cover appropriately featured a photograph of a pier (possibly the West pier in Brighton) on fire. Zsigo's connection with the South Coast has been an ever present influence but has become in recent years a very conspicuous muse for his music. So much so that one could describe In England Now, Underwater as something of a hymn to this often neglected part of the UK, which even has Zsigo using tape washed in the sea close to his home.
The opening title track sets out a widescreen vision using field recordings of surf, birds overhead and the crunch of shingle on the beach. Somewhere a lonely melody is playing, as tape noise (perhaps some of the aforementioned salty tape) rises, giving way to a short piece of spoken word, broken and distorted by the medium as if pulled water damaged from a bottle washed up on the shore. Washed Through Glass - one of several new pieces in this collection - which like its predecessor also features a few tracks pulled from recent Cremation Lily releases - is a sparkling piece of downbeat ambient techno, replete with dubby arpeggios and tolling bell tones. Radiance and Instability like As a Sea Creature Might Watch from an Aquarium are both previously released transitional pieces showcasing CL's shift away from the stock tropes of power electronics towards a more expressive and cinematic approach to tape and synth music. Zsigo has previous talked about his method as using tape as a medium for everything he records, which accounts for the strangely degraded sound to this music despite it obviously involving modern recording and mixing technology later in the process.
Leniency and Rusted Red both amply demonstrate this style; the former is a short vignette using distorted piano loops that might have been pulled from William Basinski's archive; the latter throbs with gauzy synths, light 808 percussion and those warped tape recorded sounds which flicker in the background. If the album is something of a hymn to the South Coast then The City and the Sea is its most confessional moment. With only tape hiss as an accompaniment Zsigo, crackling through the broken and degraded medium, tells of a walk down the coast: "It's October, sky's grey ... downwards ... straight lines ... After a while we walk on until it becomes too much, now there was only glass and pieces of old machinery, lightest red with the rust of the salt water". It's a strange interlude within the overall lush and widescreen vision of the record. It perhaps serves to remind the listener that much of the music's inspiration is personal recollection and experience of a particular place and time and the degradation of the tape perhaps mimics the fading and distorting of memory over time, exacerbated by the fast-food culture of constant flux and instant gratification in which many of us now live. If anything the music Cremation Lily makes seems resolutely set against just that sort of culture. It's slow, both in its unfolding and seemingly in its production too; the product not just of many hours in a home studio but many more out collecting material from the local area and finding inspiration in a life lived in that same environment. This is music from somewhere, about someone, which is pretty rare these days especially in electronic music, which tends predominantly toward faceless globalism and appropriation.
Feminine Listening allows a little light into what is an undeniably melancholic record. Beginning with slow burning strings and high pitched synth washes the track slowly opens up out of more tape artefacts - scrapes, scratches, then seagulls - as if Zsigo himself is being washed ashore. A repeated trancy stab and melody then overtake the mix, brighter and more hopeful than anything that has gone before. It ends with a snippet of conversation and perhaps clinking cutlery. Other humans do exist. Immaculacy though plays the record out to more forlorn piano loops and degraded tape noise; a reminder perhaps that even the best outcomes vanish in the fading of memory. In England Now, Underwater is certainly Cremation Lily's most mature and sophisticated work, displaying a very personal vision in at times gloriously melancholic technicolor.