Richard A Ingram — Consolamentum
Ingram's music drifts in smothering heat, mournful desolation, blank anticipation never satiated by climactic event. Light strums and soft flickers of notes outline sparse progressions, in which several seconds of silence creep in between each chord, evoking ghost towns and empty windswept planes through round tube distortion and effects imitating sweltering desert shimmer. Analog as a tattered film reel from the 1930's, tape hiss and tonal wavering are ubiquitous. Listening to it is not unlike the feeling of gazing upon a massive natural wasteland and realizing its absolute lack of feeling or compassion.
From the beginning of "Kll Thm ll..." we find ourselves immediately displaced in a dim sea of sad confusion. Scratchy tape loops drone wordless hopelessness into a softly glowing sound stage. The enveloping coat of analog fuzz the track becomes shows that like William Basinski and Wolfgang Voigt (of Gas) before him, Ingram has fallen in love with the sound of decaying tape.
An imposing piano chord sounds the entrance of "de Montfort". Organic bite size squares of pure piano tone are spliced, reverberated, arranged into a choppy melodic tape loop, then reverberated again. Rumbling sonic detritus morphs and takes on the sonic guise of chairs clattering in an empty classroom, then footsteps, finally howling wind. The yearning, waiting feel of the previous piece continues here, but this piece is more active and hopeful as well.
"The Consolamentum" is the loneliest, emptiest construction on the record. The air is heavy as Ingram struggles to nudge sluggish, questioning chords out of his instrument, his tone full of smoothly swelling, rounded bass frequencies.
In "Beziers", full-bodied periodic filter sweeps lay an evenly oscillating basis for a cinematic swell of rich e-bow harmonies and drones, which alternate between two torturous chords that speak of grief and loss. Messy, expressive solos loaded with string noise flail madly above the tonal center. As the track nears its end, the noise is filtered back and the chord progression is reduced to a thin choral murmer and the urgency drops away. Scraping, percussive guitar noises continue with a softer soliloquy, before a warm brass texture swells in for a final chord which sounds as the opening filter sweeps reclaim the piece.
A click and pop driven glitch pattern not dissimilar to the music of Alva Noto and his ilk opens "The Melioramentum", followed by the album's most otherworldly moment when a detuned chorus of lazy, drawling voices singing long tones overwhelms all other sound, only to abruptly cut into roughly recorded acoustic playing exhibiting the same kind of dejected patience as the rest of the recording. Synth long tones recorded to stuttering, mangled tape again take the fore, stretching into another forlorn panorama. The closing track "Gd Wll Rcgnz Hs wn" is a tearjerking expansion of the some of the darkest tonal ideas from "Beziers", presented in dense, compacted form that churns like black thunder clouds.
Admittedly, I've recently tired of the serious, melodramatic sentiment that prompts single-mindedly bleak albums such as this, but I can't deny the sonic depth and emotional power of all of Ingram's pieces. With a little diversification of formula, I have no doubt Ingram could conjure vast and detailed worlds. In the meantime, "Consolamentum" already has the potency and detail of many of its greatest influences, most notably Earth, and makes a marvellous soundtrack to many a dystopian image