Lance Austin Olsen — Dark Heart
The four pieces here run between nine and just over thirty-two minutes- all but one of the tracks here are based around graphic scores created from Lance Austin Olsen paintings. And each piece is intriguing, often eventful, and detailed journey into darkly stirred- yet playful modern composition, which at times steps over into blackly moody- yet subtle noisemaking.
The pieces date from between 2013 & 2017- and first up we have the just shy of ten minutes of “Theseus’ Breath(realisation #1)”- this finds a mixture of violin, electronics, percussion & cello. The piece is built around a sparse structure of string whines & stretched wails, cold & sparse electronic texturing jitters, nervy ribbons of percussion, and sudden more violent & blunt rises of angular string sawing. The work nicely introduces the listener into the darkly angular-yet often busily detailed world of the album.
The second track is thirty two-minute title track- here we get a blend two guitars, field recordings, vocal sounds, found sounds & amplified objects. The piece opens with an uneasy & lopsided blend of tiny tolling & twitching guitar tones, strange twittering electronics, and sudden drifts of rapidly popping static. As the track moves on we get odd & furtive movements of amplified objects-these add nicely to the woozy guitar wonderings, which from time-to-time take on a sawing harmonic quality. At around the five & a half minute mark, we pare back to complete silence, and fairly soon we get more new fiddling & dragging textures- this is added to by what sounds like a distant recording of a police procedural radio play- though you can never fully hear what’s going on. By around the eight-minute mark the twitching hazes of guitar texturing, electro textural detail have returned- these bring with them initial strange vocal sounds & this weird tolling melody, with sounds electronically created. Fairly soon the track pares back once again, before we shortly get a building & blending of guitar textures, undefined field recordings, amplified objects, and generally difficult to drifting sound-making. This track really is most eventful, active, and shifting in its unfold- and even after a few plays, I’m surprised by what’s around the next corner.
The remaining two tracks are “Theseus’ Breath( realisation #2)”- this nearing ten-minute track features turntable, melodica, paper & card sounds, reed organ, percussion & Organetto. This piece is a nicely unsettling blend of waving organ drones, screeches ‘n’ scrapes, descending haze of slowly altering tones- along with sudden buzzing, whiny, and grating texturing. And “A Meditation On the history of painting”- this just shy of twenty-eight minute sees the use of guitar elements again- these are mixed with wind field recordings, amplified copper plate & engraving tools recordings, wax cylinder recordings, voice & amplified iron park bench sound. This track starts in a nicely mysterious & almost loosely ritual manner- with the shifting clangs, bangs, and knocks of the amplified elements working well with the moody wind recordings. Later the track shifts into the ghostly surreal as we get blends of stretched & warbling wax cylinder voice recordings, textural slips & slices, and wound down organ music. Next we move into mixes of simmering & fading guitar twangs & picks, hazed & rolling metallic rumbles, and field recordings- it’s a most effective, channelling & rather puzzling end to proceedings.
Dark Heart certainly is an eventful & often surprising journey into modern composition- with Olsen showing that he has a real knack of blending & blurring where musical elements and none musical elements meet to create worthy works of sonic art.