No-one releases music quite like Wisconsin label Lost Tribe Sound. Specializing in what we’ve previously called “raggedly beautiful experimental music,” they are a label with an unyielding commitment to their artistic vision, a vision which is pretty much the antithesis of the ephemeral sugar rush of the streaming age. Not only is the music across their roster dark and strange and challenging, but it is released with an admirable care and attention to detail, to the extent that the physical releases feel more like multi-disciplinary artworks that conventional albums.
Despite the tumult and uncertainty of the last eighteen months, Lost Tribe Sound persevered with Built Upon A Fearful Void, a subscription series that released 16 new albums between June 2020 and present. Releases from the likes of Claire Deak & Tony Dupé, Several Wives and William Ryan Fritch‘s Vieo Abiungo project formed a rich and varied response to a very difficult year.
Ever prolific, this month sees the start of a brand new Lost Tribe Sound subscription series—Salt and Gravity. The current schedule will see it unveil eight new full-length albums between now and February next year, with what the label promise to be “some of the most texturally pungent music we’ve ever released… the good stuff that makes your whole body hum versus just rattling around inside your head.”
The first release in the series is The Rise and Fall of the Melting World by Arrowounds, the experimental project of Athens, Ohio‘s Ryan S Chamberlain. The album forms something of a continuation of the previous two Arrowounds releases, forming an unofficial trilogy which explores Chamberlain’s role as a carer for a loved one being treated for cancer. While the previous two were claustrophobic and suffocating, The Rise and Fall of the Melting World feels deceptively spacious, as if Chamberlain is able to fill his lungs with air for the first time in too long.
Which is not to say this is a record of blue skies and sunshine. Badness lurks in the shadows, the dark waters of The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver puddle and pool and threaten to rise. More general concerns encroach across the six tracks too, reminders that personal crises do not insulate us against global ones. As the press release puts it “[the] overall climate of anxiety [in] the world… threatened to darken and pollute the soundscapes during their creation.” Opening track ‘Antarctica’s Spherical Anomalies Leave Residual Trails’ is the perfect example, pairing ambient recordings of birdsong with a leaden oppressive atmosphere and great rumbling cracks like the sound of icebergs calving into the ocean.
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Chamberlain says The Rise and Fall of the Melting World is intended to explore the “aftermath and resurfacing” following the previous two records, and this sense manifests sonically. Songs like ‘Insect Dream Surfacing’ are thick with a shadowy surreal logic, but have pinpricks of lightness too, while ‘Maps to Where Poison Grows,’ feels quite literally like sailing through a tempest. But even as the wind roars, wooden beams creak and threaten to break, the vessel remains above water, refusing to succumb to its murky green depths.
But the sense of re-emergence is perhaps strongest on ‘Caverns of the Behemoth.’ The track is submerged in a briny gloom, but nevertheless emerges into a hidden grotto where there is air to breathe and the mineral drip of stalactites offer a monumental beauty. It captures something intangible that is present across the record, something about perseverance, about survival. It’s comforting only in that it exists, in the inherent rejection of the alternative that sits pale and limp on the kelp-strewn seabed. The most significant element is the systolic percussion, the constant steady pulse that rings in the ears as a reminder in the darkness that even this wreck is survivable.
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The Rise and Fall of the Melting World releases on 27th August and you can order it now from the Arrowounds Bandcamp page. You can subscribe to the Salt and Gravity series via the Lost Tribe Sound Bandcamp page.
