Lea Cummings — Revelations from the New Silence, Volume IV - Huma

The highly motivated Lea Cummings, owner of the great DIY CDr label Kovorox Sound and celebrated creator of noise under the aliases of Opaque and Kylie Minoise, is back again with this new release under his own name, the 4th in his "Revelations from the New Silence" series, which he has titled "Human Potential Movement".  The series represents the gentler, more reverent side of his work, and the five synth-sourced drones herein could be described as tools for pondering the great mysteries of existence.

I cannot stir up as much as much excitement as I had for the 3rd volume of the set, which I had the pleasure of reviewing about a year ago.  It seems that rather than pushing to new levels of clarity, Lea has assumed a hibernative posture with this fourth volume.  It continues much where the previous left off, but is notably sleepier, less alive, and less imbued with motivating energy and hope.  It's as if it is the product of a body forced to continue long past its fatiguing point.

Like the previous volume, the basic sounds here are very low budget synth preset pads, and are ultimately thin and simplistic timbres.  After Cummings has applied layers of feedback-heavy delays and distortions, they become a motionless, melodic white noise, pleasantly opaque.  The listener has a vague sense of some space obscured beyond the proliferation of synthetic snow.

Unlike the previous volume, there are no chordal shifts.  Each song simply holds.  The two longest pieces are each around 10 minutes.  "The Hidden Persuader" is a smooth, unabrasive track, a somnient float that, like a lot of ambient music, takes its pacing from nature: the patient movements of water and clouds.  It feels vaguely anticipatory, but in a strangely anesthetized manner that belies the possiblity of actual action.  It's a heady, mysterious chord Cummings has chosen; it wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch film score.

At its best, this album allows the listener's escape to a simplistic, peaceful void, a place where only a universal, basic love is experienced.  The other lengthy piece, the more optimistic "The Flight of the Alone to the Alone", exemplifies this.  The listener senses at times, however, that perhaps their own imagination is filling in many of the gaps, and that this bare bones soundscape has little actual information within it.

The best tracks are two of the shorter ones, which never threaten to wear out their welcomes.  The cleansing upper atmosphere rush of "Meetings With a Remarkable Overmind" is more active than the rest, and perfectly dimensionalized by rushes of sound which smoothly undulate between the left and right sides of the stereo field.  The glimmering metallic murmur of closer "Anticipating the Archaic Paradise" is a much darker and beautifully surreal sound, the ceaseless workings of an ancient and crystalline subterranean machinery.

Conclusively, I approve of the sentiment of this disk but find it a bit sonically lacking and compositionally insubstantial in places.  It doesn't quite have the emotional intensity of the previous volume, but certainly still manages to provide a more than adequately meditative soundscape with truly existential qualities.  I recommend it mostly to rabid fans of ambient music, or people who specifically like their ambience lo fi.  As lethargic as it is, it makes a great ambient record to sleep to, as well.  This isn't my favorite Lea Cummings release, but I continue to respect the man, his music, and his label.