Vieo Abiungo is a side project of William Ryan Fritch, an artist we have featured numerous times here at VSF. Along with long-time collaborators Lost Tribe Sound, Fritch has carved a niche in raggedly beautiful experimental music. “He makes music to fall back in, to follow into the murk and marvel at where you’re taken,” we wrote in a previous piece, “like returning to some strange land, familiar only in its oddness and pure artistic expression.”
With a double William Ryan Fritch album (Deceptive Cadence: Music For Film Vol. I & II) due later this spring, Vieo Abiungo was resurrected to fill a gap while fans, particularly those subscribed to the We Stayed The Path That Fell To Shadow album series, waited patiently. Fritch gave Lost Tribe Sound access to his considerable archive of lost and abandoned albums, and like intrepid explorers in some faraway tomb, they blew away the dust and cobwebs and found some real gems. The resulting album, titled The Dregs, showcases these songs in all their uncanny glory, a collection that “buzze[s] with the same raw and texturally unpredictability” that Fritch has made his own.
Despite the dichotomy between projects, Fritch’s aims with both are similar. He uses Vieo Abiungo as a vehicle to transport the listener, creating what Lost Tribe describe as “music that leaves its tattered edges proudly in place, acoustic instrumentation blended seamlessly with dirty mechanics, timeworn sound worlds rooted in the muck and mire of the present.” The Dregs is no different, a tangled cacophony of ramshackle percussion and viola de gamba, joined by an array of horns, marimbas, vintage keyboards, mbiras, and Tuareg-style electric guitars. The result is akin to a North African fever dream, an opium den of swirling poly-rhythms and genuinely surprising percussive shifts.
From the ominous shuffling stomp of opener ‘Fronting’ to the expansive heat-stroked white-out of ‘A Branch Gave Way’, the album remains unpredictable and illusory throughout. To add to the swirling surreality, Lost Tribe’s Ryan Keane has also made a video for ‘Cobble Together’. Taking footage from the Prelinger Archives, the video is made of gauzy overlaid layers of old black and white images, a dream-like collage of yawning hippos, tribal masks and convoys of both camels and 4x4s.
The Dregs is out now on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it on cassette or download from the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page.
