HOLLYDRIFT

Waiting For the Tiller

Parasomnic Records (2004)

review by Brian Voerding

Machines are the workhorses of our generation. In many ways, they are not unlike animals used for similar purposes a few hundred years ago, in that they require sustenance (power) become sick (break down), are helpless to the whims and desires of the operator, and most unsettling, often seem to sound, in some sense, alive. Machines came with the industrial revolution, and with the industrial revolution came noise. In the subsequent one hundred-plus years, noise has become a dominant cultural element in many forms, invoking stolid assembly-line rhythms, urban industrial soundscapes, and even staticy drive-through speaker boxes and humming air conditioners in proliferating urban sprawl. Insomniacs searching for a single restful moment now shirk Mozart sonatas in favor of white noise.

Composers responded to this, capturing the rhythmic and ambient nature of machines and industrial noise, incorporating them into conceptual frameworks and complex soundscapes. Hollydrift is one such composer.

Hollydrift (a.k.a. Mathias Anderson) crafts stories with sound collages in traditions not unlike those of Illusion of Safety or Nurse with Wound. In Waiting For the Tiller, his latest full-length release, tape loops are used as a natural musical response to the repetitious sounds of factory assembly lines, of speeding train wheels clicking methodically on metal tracks. Radios with lighted analog tuners crackle to life, and noise is prevalent. To compose and orchestrate a successful sound composition is to invoke industry's aura of mystery and awe, and Anderson does this quite successfully. As certain people are instantly and forever captivated by New York, others are by the sound of industry. If the listener falls under the latter (or even the former) category, this record is sure to invoke a slew of vivid fictional imagery and reality-based recollections.

The record opens with "Marisa Relay" and at onset, it is Godspeed! You Black Emperor tape loop composition sans crisp snare drum rolls, laced with thick, metallic drones. A voice, perhaps that of a child, speaks Marisa's name in pleading tones. A background melody rises above and soon drowns out the soft voice, with dry bows tearing across cello strings and an archaic answering machine message in the foreground.

"Lakeshore Skycue" finds crickets cooing restlessly in farm fields. Anderson busies himself with the sounds of a rural night, a true rural night, where the sky and every star is held at arms-length. A confused machine begins beeping before ambience comes sweeping in, lost among the dewey grass and the stars and the wilting stalks of yellow corn turned brown. This is wonderment, expressed through minimalism, eventually fading into tape-saturated noise and breathy, rhythmic expulsions.

Sonorous open choral harmonies (read: John Blow) are the droning backbone of "Ghost From Third Grade", a controlled chaos of a summer storm. The spliced harmony pitches bend and fade and swell, pulled and stretched like taffy by storm winds. Anderson works well here and in the meat of the record, juxtaposing the sounds of electronics chirping to one another, like birds happily perched on telephone wires in the July heat, with feedback waves and and drone-like chanting. The chanting invokes druids with heads bowed, pacing dreary, measured steps around stones. It returns multiple times in the record, used as a unifying theme.

"Mary Red Marjorette" drapes lovingly around a fuzzed out, booming melody, incorporating noise vehicles of urban sprawl, often sounding like an overheating motorcycle entangled in a lawnmower than just ran over a rusted chainsaw. The track transitions into David Lynch film de-tuned strings, and the voice is back. It reminds me of watching trains by the Mississippi, listening to the echoey voice of barge operators carrying across the rippling water. The now multiple voices are blown into slowly synthesized chaos, and then into a single gust of howling wind.

Tiller drifts through a myriad of other mechanical and electronic sound sources finding a two-voice narrative slightly reminiscent of Lou Reed and John Cale reading Reed's twisted fiction simultaneously in separate channels. In the record's close, "Haven of Rest", swirling wind begets quiet thunderstorms, which fade into window patterns of raindrops.

Waiting for the Tiller is a great record. Anderson accomplishes his intentions, and his artistry ranks high alongside other sound source and electronics-contrived compositions.