Welcome to the Church of Light & Sound (2010)
BY JASON GANTENBERG I March 1, 2010
Church of Light & Sound's self-titled debut album is an aural patchwork consisting of a range of genres from noise to rock, interwoven at times and at times butted up against one another so that birdsong violently clashes with pounding guitar or static punctures gentle, cascading synth-esque movements. As a whole, the album does little to displease, and its sweeping ambient tableaus — themselves mixtures of piano, guitar, and electronic sounds — recall elements of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and even Aphex Twin.
My own experience with noise music has been less than favorable most of the time. I don't buy into the static shamans peddling their liturgies of screeching wails and undulation and perspiration, and much of the genre seems to be held captive by the notion that the only music worth making is that which proves biologically intolerable. A musical dogma based on these tenets means that any hack with a broken speaker can pump some ungodly vibrations through the thing and consider oneself a noise musician. Perhaps my estimation of the noise genre is unfair, and in some instances, the practitioners in question probably find it preferable to skirt altogether the classification of their craft as music. (It is important to note that not all noise performers fall into this category. Think of a canvas equivalent like Jackson Pollock, whose work was deliberate but chaotic and not easily replicated due to the surprising consistency of shapes and patterns that emerged in many of his paintings.)
Despite its residence in the Ambient genre, Church of Light & Sound (2010) more than tangentially contacts the outskirts of noise music effectively but without resorting to the aforementioned cheap tricks and pitfalls, the main difference being that the arrangements on this record have an undeniable progression toward the end, an order (or at least, purpose) to the chaos similar to what I described in my reference to Pollock, not to mention the comparative variety of sounds to be found on Church of Light & Sound. The record is a spiral collapsing into a single point and bereft of the sort of ham-fisted token nihilism that one could easily forgive of this format. On the contrary, the record takes an almost Eastern bent, evident only in spoken excerpts that pop up throughout, the most notable and memorable being the track entitled "from the Book of Wisdom, Osho Speaks on the Ego" in which the speaker laments individualism and detachment from nature, touting instead a release of such preoccupations and the resultant peace gained by doing so.
Regardless of my personal religious/spiritual opinions, this track serves in my mind as the lynchpin of the entire album. It is the foundation upon which most of the musical tropes are based, and the sensation at the end of Osho's oration is indeed one of deep tranquility set against a beautiful recording of birds singing. It is the kind of cacophony one may only find in uninhabited parts of the world these days, a bright, elating sound and one that perseveres through the album's chaos, its melancholy, its sadness, all of which reinforce one another and result in a rich, well-crafted album that in the hands of Church of Light & Sound founder Jacob Hamm resists the temptation to fly off the rails.
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