(is) is the latest project of Isobel Bess, a sound artist, experimental musician and poet from Pennsylvania who has been making music in various guises for the last two decades. Bess utilises everything from synthesizers, bass, field recordings and electroacoustic sound manipulation to create strange worlds from tone and texture. Latest record, Light Play, is described as her first full-length collaboration with the “discorporate extratemporal signal” known as (is). A phenomenon channelled by Bess which “resonates beyond and between the temporal boundaries of truncated futures,” as the album notes put it. “A discorporate signal encoding the unrealized.”
It is unsurprising then that Light Play takes inspiration from the speculative and socially-aware sci-fi of the likes of Octavia Butler and the Strugatsky brothers. Fiction of imagined futures and distorted pasts which refracts the present back to us in all of its strangeness, able to describe not only its outrages and weirdness but that which is absent too. (is) conjures her own world of synths and static and subdued beats, an “ambient album for the apocalypse” which evokes what we’ve lost, what we’re in the process of losing and what never came to be.
Take the spacious drift of opener ‘Deep Time (Degenerating Spine Mix)’, which together with its spoken word poetry evokes the present as a thin line between unknown future and primordial ancientness, rendering its banal cruelties in all of their ridiculous transience. The brooding creep of ‘Psychoprobe Console’ unfurls into a kind of melancholic march, while ‘Diffraction (Bellona Transmission)’ blurs any line between organic and digital in its verdant textures. Though, as in final track ‘departure’, the clarity which comes with this sense of the natural is invaded by distortion. Staticky glitches that reveal the whole thing to be a dream or projection, something we might have had. The mood is central to the release, one which demands we return to the present against our wishes or failing judgement. “Hovering somewhere between signal and noise,” the album notes conclude, “Light Play echoes back from (im)possible futures to ask a singular question of the uncertain present: what now?”
Cover art by Vin Tanner