When longstanding member Thomas Ragsdale left the band last year, the future looked uncertain for worriedaboutsatan. Founding member Gavin Miller was now the only member, and in the aftermath of the departure he gave much thought to the idea of parking the moniker for good. Miller had already recorded music under his own name, some of which has featured alongside worriedaboutsatan in the films of Adam Curtis (for whom Miller works as a music supervisor), and worriedaboutsatan had gone on something of a hiatus in 2011 when the duo formed Ghosting Season. The band was not the be all and end all of Miller’s career, and maybe its time was up.
But still, worriedaboutsatan had been in operation since 2005, existing for a short while as a solo project before Ragsdale joined up. Couldn’t it return to its earlier form and live on? After much reflection, Miller decided that he was not finished with the project, and set to work on Time Lapse, an album that represents the first output of worriedaboutsatan as a solo endeavour that will be released on Oakland label n5MD this May.
Our first taste of the record comes in the form of the richly atmospheric ‘Dawn’, Described as “occupying that space between electronic pulses and human emotion.” In fact, two versions of the song exist. The first, that which opens the record, is a slow-burning ten minute track where beats slowly emerge through the eerie ambience, electronica as played in an abandoned space, haunted by lingering energies of the past.
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The second, the ‘ambient edit’ of the song, is in fact a complete reworking, the 808 kicks stripped out to place the focus squarely on Miller’s guitar, allowing the post-rock sensibilities to shine through. The version can in some ways be viewed as the inverted twin of the album track, where the electronica is no longer haunted by the ambience but haunting it. Imagine the abandoned space once the electronica has packed up and moved on, its beats just another vestigial flicker of things now gone.
Or perhaps the the opposite is true. Because if you play the tracks in the reverse order, the edit plays directly into the album version. In this configuration, the edit is no longer haunted but prophetic, a dream in which the nascent beats rouse themselves, only to be made real in the song to come. Either way, both tracks are great and promise much of the record in May.
Time Lapse is out on the 8th May via n5MD and you can pre-order it now on a variety of formats from Bandcamp.
