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Andrew Chalk, "Vega"
Chalk has again walked a very fine line between complete abstraction and conscious identification. It's something that I feel only this genre is capable of and that Chalk, in particular, has managed to portray on Vega.Faraway Press
Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra; it'd be easy to make some vacuum of space reference when talking about Andrew Chalk's music, but it wouldn't be very helpful or insightful. There are plenty of opinions that'll make every drone record sound the same because, apparently, they all have the same focus. All of them imitate the feeling of floating weightlessly, of being taken somewhere else and it is because they provide little context for the average listener to hold onto while navigating the often beat-less, melody-less grooves of whatever record it at stake. Well, if all of them sound the same, how is it that Chalk always sounds unique?
There are two answers.
The first one, the short one, is that the genre actually doesn't lend itself to homogeneity: it is more prone to being consistently different than just about any other genre barring noise. The other answer, the interesting one, is that Chalk steps a bit differently, proceeds with his sound in a fulfilling fashion, and somehow works with his sound more like a composer than anyone else. I can imagine him toying with his sounds like they're clay, shaping them to make an architecture or to plan an entire geographic region. Every release Chalk has seems to produce this same effect, this sense of a musician as sculptor.
Vega opens up a space without a doubt, but the feeling it produces is like sound trying to find its borders. As the album begins the entire sound is bathed in a kind of blind stupor, sounds traveling aimlessly for minutes at a time before the distinct impression of a bell is made clear. As the record progresses over its three movements, the overall structure of the album becomes more acute despite being composed of broad strokes and impressionistic stabs of sound.
The most change occurs in tone, however, elevating the album from a tomb-like sound to the hum of the open air. Conceptually the whole album sounds like a liberation from architecture and a step away from the tight, always very centered sound that Chalk employs. Whatever the case, Vega has that static and rolling sound in its first half and then slowly dissolves, revealing a subterranean process that might've been working throughout the whole album.
Once the mood lightens up, Chalk moves into new territory for me. None of what I've heard by him, even his work in Mirror, has ever sounded this free and random. He manages to maintain a hint of the thematic developed early in the album but slowly moves away from it until, at the very end, a completely new dynamic has emerged. The album is, for a time, tightly wound and dependent upon itself for tension, but the release generated at the end is almost vertiginous in its upward movement. There's a double effect taking place for the duration of the record, then. The sounds on the album become more obvious and take a definite shape throughout the whole album, even as the tone lightens up and the structure of the album becomes more indefinite and effervescent. It's hard to imagine but amazing to hear.
This is a change for Chalk, though, and it's a subtle step he's taken away from his earlier solo recordings. I imagine fuller and more extreme transitions are on the way.
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