 |
|
Andrew Liles, "All Closed Doors"
The art of the sound collage and drone music has a group of key members. Mirror, Christoph Heemann, Andrew Chalk, William Basinski, and perhaps just a few more are known and loved and create music that invokes images from other worlds; be those images frightening, sublime, or esoteric, it is impossible to deny their visceral impact. Andrew Liles has been added to that list of elusive and wonderful musicians with this release.
From the first moment All Closed Doors submerges me into a universe I'm unfamiliar with and perhaps slightly scared of. Furniture drifts through the air, children laugh and disappear down long hallways, shadows scream and laugh at eachother when there is nothing to cast them, and the echo of something ancient pours down over me in the form of a vacant sky. The impact of Liles' sound worlds on this disc is unavoidable, his imaginative and spectral cadences whisper and glide through the air in ways that effect the brain; scary stories are told without the aid of a voice, heaven spills over from the speakers into the room even though such a thing is unthinkable. There's a strange light that bounces and reflects off of everything in this world; there are oceans of singing fish and mountains bellowing their hate onto the helpless below. I can't stop coming up with images, it's as if my mind is flooded with an invisible light that forces it into overdrive, into a creative process that can't stop, that wouldn't stop if the album didn't end. Very rarely do I find an album so immediate and compelling as this; I often have butterflies while listening to it. It is perhaps the equivalent of a sexual release extened over fifty minutes of sound. None of the overtly sexual material from Liles' Aural Anagram/Anal Aura Gram is here, but there's that mysterious and ancient something looming over the whole of this release. It's a tension that can't be avoided, a physical tension created in the presence of an erotic and secretive resonance. 
samples:
