Though strictly the recording project of Benjamin Lovell, Lung Cycles is a collaborative endeavour. Featuring the likes of Jason Calhoun (naps), Bill Delaney (The National Park Service), Jeremy Ferris (Cla-ras), Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel), Francis Lyons (Dumperall) and Daniel Stuhr (Vierzig Skizzen), the project draws the talents of many into a focused ideal, building not so much songs as worlds or dimensions, spaces separate from our own.
That Lung Cycles ‘songs’ could not quite be labelled as such is explored in a bio by Emmerich Anklam (AKA Distant Reader), who points to the position of Lovell within the tracks as evidence of their idiosyncratic nature. “A song implies a singer at center stage,” Anklam says, “a voice that plays ruler of the song’s little kingdom. There’s something deist about these new [Lung Cycles] songs, as if the musicians are setting them up and then sneaking away quietly while the music continues to play.”
The first collection from Lung Cycles in five years, the new self-titled album feels like a fulfilment of such a process. It is as though the collaborative nature of the recording has decentralised any power, and, with no one authority controlling the outcome, the songs are left to grow in their own directions. As a result, Lovell and co. are less artists dictating their views and ideas as gateways through which something else entirely can emerge.
Which might sound New Age-y and trite, but the reality is anything but. Because the forces being channelled are not Moon Goddesses and Solar Deities, but rather more mundane, humanistic things such as patience and sensitivity. Lung Cycles is in many ways the antithesis of our contemporary existence, unhurried and understated and underpinned by a sense of natural rhythm at odds with our new world. It is not aiming to trigger or assuage some base desire, nor looking to exploit some easily provoked emotion. Instead, the record is happy to be more diffuse and aimless, and indeed it is in that very lack of cynical purpose that Lung Cycles unearth meaning and value. As Anklam puts it:
Lung Cycles aren’t erasing themselves from the picture, but they’re not imposing themselves on you either. They’re giving themselves the freedom to move into the background and observe the play of light and color and shadow, savoring the loose embrace of a warm night, making their richly textured collective dreams responsive to the outside world’s serendipity.
Opening track ‘As the sun stayed down’ is a case in point, balanced somewhere between peace and dread and never quite toppling in either direction. Lovell’s vocal emerge and dissipate with the uneven cadence of breeze through the trees, though his delivery itself is composed and straight, as though removed from the emotions of the soundscape by time or space. “It’s like he’s speaking softly to a confidant late at night,” Anklam puts it, “recounting the strains of the day while acknowledging the need to let them go.”
The title of ‘Hottest day of the year so far (4pm version)’ elucidates the tone of the track, a gentle meandering song filled with glinting brightness, the harsh heat of noon softened into golden haze as the shadows slowly stretch. A similar vibe follows through onto ‘Cammal’, like a good day as recalled in memory where all edges are rounded into idyllic tranquillity. That Lovell adds no vocals to these tracks is pertinent, his silence signalling not an absence but a presence, and one too serene to put into language.
Indeed, it is notable that the return of the vocals on ‘Following me up the stairs’ and ‘Blue Rochester moon’ signals a slight shift in mood toward something a little more troubled. The tenderness remains, the emotion more thoughtful than tortured, though comparison with the instrumental middle section is marked. The placid natural flow continues whether we voice our concerns or not, and nothing in this external sphere is working to exacerbate our feelings. In this way, Lung Cycles reveals anxiety and melancholy to be no more than parasites of the human psyche, forces all too willing to consume us should we centre our existence within our own heads, but soon found dead in the vacuum of natural quiet.
Artwork designed and printed by Jeremy Ferris