At Once, There Was No Horizon, the new album from Vieo Abiungo (side project of the unique and prolific William Ryan Fritch) comes nearly ten years after the release of the project’s debut, a record which started Fritch’s long-term partnership with Lost Tribe Sound. The album forms part of Built Upon A Fearful Void, a series of fifteen albums that Lost Tribe will release periodically over the next year or so, both digitally and on beautifully designed CDs. Following four previous Vieo Abiungo albums, as well as near countless under his own name, At Once, There Was No Horizon sees Fritch continue to create what we’ve referred to previously as his “raggedly beautiful experimental music,” a dark alter ego of anything you might expect to find in the ambient and modern classical fields.
The album is “an expanse of impressionistic tonal color,” Lost Tribe explains, “where elliptical patterns of horns, reeds, bowed metals and the ecstatic chatter of unfamiliar percussion cluster, rise and decay.” Fritch weaves this panoply of elements into something peculiar yet organic, conjuring an experience at once menacingly ominous and lushly evocative. You awaken in the shambling fever dream of ‘Balkanize’, amygdala visions of a reeling forest canopy illuminated in stark torchlight. The reedy flutes join a malarial chorus of clicks and clacks that circle in a wicked dance, and woodwind groans like laboured lungs, a faraway melody snaking like candleflame in the night.
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The album continues in this vein, Fritch again demonstrating his ability to call forth worlds of his own making to create music that defies any conventional description. ‘Unfulfilled Promise’ grows in intensity towards a cathartic midpoint, while ‘A Cold Calculus’ unfurls in a lazy writhing motion, skittering percussion scuttling from the corners like paranoid thoughts. Remaining relatively subdued throughout, it’s part somber, part sinister, but fades into a white glow that feels neither, resisting the urge to throw off its shackles and erupt in noise.
The title track is a journey into an unknown, perhaps toward some strange destination deep in the folds of the brain rather than anywhere physical. Galloping percussion rattles across a wash of tone and texture, giddy horns mewling and whispering from within the murk. Beyond the halfway point there’s a hush, the whole track falling away to a tribal shuffle and oppressive negative space. Then the far-off moan of a ghostly choir approaches and suddenly you’ve been turned around, find yourself right back where you started.
Closer ‘Empty Heroics’, the record’s longest track at just over ten minutes, proceeds on its own path. Encapsulating the entire album, it shifts from the near-devotional choral quality of its opening to menacing stomps of sound and beguiling negative space. By the halfway mark bedraggled percussion has shuffled in, a junkyard beat that ebbs and flows in unlikely rhythm, an orchestra of rattles, thuds and scrapes that Fritch reanimates and directs to his bidding. Nobody else makes music quite like it. Here’s to ten more years of Vieo Abiungo.
At Once, There Was No Horizon is out 16th October on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it via the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page. Alternatively, subscribe to Lost Tribe’s Built Upon a Fearful Void series to get the album as one of 15 releases over the coming months.
