Llyn Y Cwn — Du Y Moroedd
Du Y Moroedd is album number three from this Welsh dark ambient project on Cold Spring Records. With the ten-track album bringing together sea/ boat field recordings, with moodily ebbing, flowing, and darker drifting ambience. It’s an album that, at points, has issues balancing these two elements evenly- with moments occurring when the field recordings become a little overbearing/ repetitive. Yet when it does manage to get the balance right, there are some really heady and compelling moments on display here.
Llyn Y Cwn (Welsh - lake of the dogs) formed in the year 2009, and it’s all the work of Ben Powell- who has been creating music/ sound since 1996. To date, the project has ten releases to its name- six of these are CDR/ digital releases on Powell’s own label Mankymuisc, three on Cold Spring, and one on tape release Llugwy released in 2020 on Japan’s Muzan Editions. I’ve reviewed the other two Cold Spring releases, as well as interviewing Ben in 2020 about the project- this can be found here.
The CD comes presented in a wonderfully moody looking digipak- this features monochrome pictures (taken by Powell) of barren beaches, brooding cloud heavy seascapes, and hazed by sea fog islands. The album can be purchased/ samples heard played here
Apparently, the field recording elements were captured on board the RV Prince Madog -while Powell conducted research using multibeam sonar to locate, survey and identify shipwrecks from WW1. Also featured are recordings made whilst RRS James Clark Ross, ploughing through ice fields of Greenland.
We kick off with nearing five minutes of “Du Y Moroedd”- it opens with the barren sounds of sea spray, and a tolling buoy. In time we can make out the distant eerier knocks and bangs of the boat, with Powell bringing up this hauntingly hovering ghost-like drone. Unfortunately, the buoy keeps tolling ever so often, and sadly this feels both jarring & to me rather annoying- rather stripping much of the impact the track should have had.
Moving on things do improve- we have just over five minutes of “Submergence” which brings together creepy tone hits, bubbling and shifting water sounds, and this haunting harmonic swell ‘n’ ebb. We have the distant pulsing sonar, brooding ship noises, and greyly simmering to darkly float drones of “The Hunt”. There’s the eerier ice knock and frigid water lap of “Erebus and The Terror” with drifts with foreboding bass hovers, and deep dark ambient undercurrents.
The album is finished off with the epic thirty-one minutes of “Stratigraphy” here we start off with a blend of mid-range glowing ambience, slightly brighter shifting harmonic drones, and brooding ebbs and drifts. This is undercut by sea against boat hull sounds, and bubbling water tones- so all well and good so far. By the fourth minute, the rushing ocean sounds have grown and is nicely blended with the grimly warbling to hauntingly ebbing ambience. At around the tenth minute, I think one of the most annoying sounds I’ve ever heard appears- it’s like this constant ticking tone- that’s not unlike the sound an indicator on a car makes. As we go on this element starts to become both thicker & rhythmic pulsing in its thin electro snare like tapping, and with this, it becomes even more moody spoiling and grating. The element just feels ill-convinced, oddly paced, out-of-place and generally not effective- and sadly it remains for the rest of the track.
For me, Du Y Moroedd was bookended by disappointment- with the (mainly) good stuff in its centre. There is no doubt Powell is a talented sound creator- and when he gets the balance of ambient and field recordings exactly right, you really do get well and truly sucked into his sound worlds.