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Letha Rodman Melchior, "Shimmering Ghost"
This posthumous release is a thoroughly bittersweet affair, as Shimmering Ghost is both Rodman Melchior's final album and her finest hour (probably, anyways).  A series of fractured and flickering collages, these pieces are "experimental" in the best sense of the word, using an unpredictable and simple mixture of instrumentation, found sounds, and field recordings to weave together a very complex, intimate, and evocative narrative.  At its best, Ghost makes me feel like I am drifting through an immersive, mysterious, and disorienting stream of someone else's dreams and memories.  No one else makes albums like this.
It is hard to figure out where to even begin with this deeply otherworldly and unique album, as sound collage is hardly anything new, yet Letha’s execution somehow makes it feel that way.  The bulk of the magic lies primarily in the details and the textures, though it also helps that Rodman Melchior was smart and inventive enough to find a way to make a haunted-sounding album seem nuanced and sensual rather than like another boring dark ambient album.  Her success in that regard stems largely from her decision to seamlessly drift between the familiar and the unfamiliar as though the barrier separating our own plane from the supernatural one has weakened and become porous.  The opening "Edymion/MWCIE" is an especially fine example of that tight-rope walk, as its initial Sonic Youth-esque guitar unexpectedly gives may to a beautiful harp waltz from guest Mary Lattimore, albeit one enhanced with eerily swooping, Theremin-like wordless singing amidst subtle hisses and shudders. Eventually, the harp interlude dissipates, but the bottom has effectively dropped out for good, as the hapless guitar figure now has to contend with intruding horses, church bells, and something resembling a Bollywood soundtrack before it all dissolves once more into a hypnotic locked groove swirling with hallucinatory peripheral touches.
The best pieces, however, are the ones that start out completely disorienting and unstuck in time and only escalate from there without any nods towards recognizable contemporary music.  On "Marsh of Diseases," for example, a brief church organ introduction quickly dissolves into rippling snatches of harp amidst a delirious haze of echoing voices, hiss, panned crackling, and a sublimely warm bed of swelling drones.  "Southern Highlands," on the other hand, begins with a man announcing that he has a ghost story to share.  As his tale starts to unfold, however, a simple and bittersweet piano reverie appears beneath him and the tale itself is dismembered into a swirl of echoing and reverberating fragments.  While those two pieces are the album’s clear highlights, Shimmering Ghost is strewn with a number of other unexpectedly beautiful interludes, such as the blurred and doubled monologue that appears over a twinkling and melancholy piano at the end of "Red Moon/Fra Mauro."
As far as I am concerned, Shimmering Ghost has no real flaws: I may wish that it were a little longer or that the balance leaned more heavily towards Letha's eerier, dreamier side, but the album works perfectly exactly the way it is.Although several pieces feel like noisy, textural filler when examined on their own, they provide necessary transitions between the more beautiful, substantial pieces and serve to heighten the escalating sense of dislocation and shimmering unreality: this album works as an effectively sequenced and abstractly phantasmagoric narrative arc rather than as a start-to-finish cavalcade of highlights.  Also, the relative brevity works in Shimmering Ghost's favor, as none of the less memorable stretches sticks around long enough to overstay their welcome.  More importantly, Letha's work feels singularly guileless, purposeful, and unpretentious despite its sophistication, resembling Outsider Art or Folk Art made by someone who actually knew exactly what they were doing and what had come before, but chose to step outside the experimental music continuum in an effort to make something more sincere and meaningful (and succeeded beautifully).  Shimmering Ghost is a minor masterpiece.
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