Earlier this year when Anduin and Jasper TX released The Bending of Light, fellow Silent Ballet staffer Nayt Keane astutely discussed the different environments that deep drone music has the potential to take its listener to, writing: “[Drone] can pelt you in the face with sand and wind.” This couldn’t be truer of Anduin’s latest solo effort, Abandoned In Sleep.
It could be altogether possible that Abandoned In Sleep hits me with such a storm on its own merits, but it is certainly aided by an incidental literary companion. That companion is Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves. I say incidental, because it was not planned but also not pure accident. In Mishima’s novel, the Pacific rages with a fierce and thunderous power that can instill fear, but the inhabitants of the island respect the ocean as a great and trustworthy friend. It is this very paradox that fuels a deeper connection between the novel and Abandoned In Sleep, a music-literature connection I have not felt so deeply since the parallel turmoil of Isis’ Panopticon and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The hue and timbre of sounds and imagery are not always interlocked, but they often share some common thread. Here, with Mishima and Anduin, there is often the battle between calm and rage, but also desire versus cultural guidelines and acceptability. So, without quibbling over details, just keep in mind the push-pull existence of living in the middle of that state of paradox, the liminal space so few see, as we continue on from here.
On the whole, Abandoned In Sleep is haunting, yet with a warming quality. It’s like a wordless translation of descriptions of near-death experiences, where the blood pools thickly to keep us at the threshold, that transitory area between life and death. Anduin has created an aural space that continually skips back and forth between the storm and the eye of the storm. While it may sound like a train wreck of contrasts, Jonathan Lee (aka Anduin) works excitably well when on the verge of spinning off axis.
Take “Our Future Is A Debt,” for example. It moves from snarling in the mouths of mythical wolves to fluttering like interrupted sunrays in a psychedelic haze. This movement around the spectrum allows the music to completely destroy time, and it is almost as if within five and a half minutes, “Our Future…” ticks down the moments of an epoch’s birth and death. And what tickles me about making such a grand, cosmic analogy is the connection to Carl Sagan on Anduin and Jasper TX’s last project, which used the poet’s words for song titles, as Nayt pointed out in his review. This is not feigned synchronicity; I hadn’t read Nayt’s review in five months when I formed these opinions. But, this record also goes beyond the pure drone of The Bending of Light.
There is still drone a-plenty here, but it is often infused with more rhythm than usual, more activity and energy. Need proof? Look no further than “Contents Of A Black Box,” which thumps like the slow-to-die remnants of a dub dancehall thrasher, even if that would be one of the last stylistic connections most listeners will make. After a lighter is repeatedly struck in a swirling room to ignite the track, the harmonica (absent from the Jasper TX collaboration) pulls these sonics back from the Caribbean to the dust bowl. What occurs is an amazing gene-splicing of 21st Century electro aesthetics with three generations of blues: gut-wrenching echoes of sweat and labor. The harmonica playing is far from virtuoso, but it stretches out loud and clear, as if played above a body of water. And while it emulates a dusty old blues with some randomly plucked strings, we begin to crawl in our own discomfort in a rapid extraction from the rhythmic soothing of before.
Lee continues to storm on “Autumn Looming,” which explicates how the storm can also be the source of comfort. In Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, the young boy and girl who have fallen in love are only able to see each other when the fishing is halted by storms. Thus, they meet clandestinely at the calm and confused center of the storm raging about their island. “Autumn Looming” doesn’t parallel this in title only. It chokes and stutters along a string of electronic bits and acoustic ephemera, starting out by relieving itself of the effluvia of a distant, scattered message across the cosmos. There are blips, but they are such micro-slices that they are unintelligible as pieces and morph into their own wholes like separate squalls. As it heaves out of view, chains and chimes struggle to steady themselves in the slow wind preceding the big storm.
Hopefully, I’ve made it clear that this is an interesting listen full of well thought out drones, found sounds, and distant blues exorcisms, but that it is also totally uncomfortable, at times full of specters all staring us down. Standing with one foot in each hemisphere, straddling the invisible lines of paradox, is never about easily nestling into a warm corner and staying there. With ears encapsulated in some nice big headphones, the listener sits in the midst of an elegant mix of the turbulent and unending calm.
-Gabriel Bogart