Human Greed — Fortress Longing

Fortress Longing, the fourth album from Human Greed, sees the duo of Michael Begg and Deryk Thomas stride even further into the no-man’s land found bordering ambient electronica, musique concrète and minimalist classical composition, an area glimpsed on their previous album, Black Hill. Before then their immersive, funereal sound had been untempered by formal instrumentation, but Begg’s increasing involvement as part of Fovea Hex acted as a catalyst in introducing traditional instruments such as piano and cello into Human Greed’s digital pooling of drowned drones and crystalline synths. As a result, Fortress Longing has the confidence and construct of a single orchestral symphony, albeit with field recordings and feedback woven into portentous pulsations and sonorous swells.

The album is subtitled ‘The Internal Campaign for the Safe and Complete Return of the Sleeping Egyptian to the Desert’ following a visit to the British Museum where the juxtaposition of an ancient Egyptian corpse exhibited amongst other ‘trophies’ of colonialism, so far away from its natural resting place, inspired Begg to create the notional Campaign and review his own neuroses surrounding death. And yet, the concept works more as a score than a firm narrative, providing a thematic discipline through which Begg and Thomas collected, shaped and placed their sounds. Although actual words are used sparingly and only occasionally, it is much more an impressionistic sound world full of dramatic elemental and ethereal passages from foreign places for the listener to remotely view. While a strong and mysterious Eastern vibe that the album’s subtitle premeditates is evident - particularly on tracks like Malagathens:hotel and The Green Line where Julia Kent’s dark, rich and full-bodied cello slowly arcs and soars – many of the tracks could easily be describing other natural environments away from the desert, but always lonely, bleak and vast ones be they the middle of the ocean or a frozen mountain range.

Evocative field recordings guide us through these lands like a psychogeographic travelogue, from pen writing on paper to wind chimes to religious chant and children’s voices, often lit elegantly by the flickering flame of feedback. Meanwhile mournful refrains, mainly on piano, embed and reprise throughout the journey often reminiscent of lamentable phrases from children’s nursery rhymes (particularly Frère Jacques). Consequently, the album should be taken in a single, intense dose – although there are twelve individual tracks their transitions and edits are like crosswinds: natural, invisible and with the unpredictable power to chill or destroy – leading the hardy listener to its cataclysmic finale that aspires to bring ‘An End To Death’ no less, while sounding like its bringing a very real end to the insides of a piano.

A ‘Special Edition’ of 120 comes with a second disk containing a recent interpretation of Fortress Longing’s ingredients by Michael Begg and Colin Potter. It features a single, 36 minute piece named Deshret (meaning desert) that glides at the constant, serene pace of a spacewalking cosmonaut through a cross section of the album’s topographies. In doing so, it highlights just how much variety of movement the main album surreptitiously contains through its many restless layers whose lush details are here explored just one or two at a time, like some future ritual respectfully dedicated to the memory of the ‘Campaign’.