Making music for over a decade, Salt Lake City’s Willow Skye-Biggs has utilised a whole host of monikers in her commitment to exploring ” the intersections of identity and ritual.” Each name finds Skye-Biggs drawing upon different styles and genres to circle around these themes, ranging from the experimental, beat-driven pop of Stag Hare to the bedroom techouse of Ariel.
As part of Whited Sepulchre Records’ split cassette series, Skye-Briggs has adopted the new alias Sabriel’s Orb and teamed up with Sydney’s John Atkinson to produce an EP that delves into a more ambient-based sound. The new direction grants a degree of space that might not be allowed in pop or techno, each song a slow-burning longform piece that is allowed to rise and collapse under its own volition.
Take first track ‘Secret’, the faint yet warm backdrop a canvas across which things can shoot and streak, synths radiating, pulsing and surging, regressing to silence and flickering back once more. The result is something mysterious yet comforting, outside of our existence or else above it, a place or space so timeless that anything might happen there.
‘Holding’ continues the sensation, the lead-on from the previous track near seamless. However, the latter half of the song sees an increasingly sweeping atmosphere as Skye-Briggs’s techno leanings show through, as though, having been lead through a beautiful vastness, we are greeted by some sublime sight or sound that transcends all that came before. The swell recedes back into relative quiet, though the possibility has now been made clear—the supraworld of Sabriel’s Orb could contain anything.
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On the other side of the release, John Atkinson offers his own meditative brand of synthscape. Atkinson, who used to play in the hypnogogic Brooklyn band Aa, also creates scores for film, his “uneasy atmospheres” providing the backing for documentaries about contract killers and “listless graduates in arthouse comedies.” The experience might well inform his offering here, as the tracks are immersive and strange, conjuring their own environments of foggy atmosphere. ‘Backwaves // Rye’ unfolds within this misty world, the slow calm of contemplation colouring each drift.
‘First Rain of the New Year’ is equally evocative, though the pensive mood here tends toward a subtle, worming dread, the steadily growing drone portent of some far-off yet ever-approaching tumult. The punctuating calls of birds only serving to heighten the feeling, reinforcing an absence of humanity and grounding the piece within the natural. Whatever might come will be beyond our control, and there is beauty in it.
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Sabriel’s Orb / John Atkinson is out now via Whited Sepulchre Records and you can buy it from Bandcamp.
Artwork by Dustin Bowen