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.

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.

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Adrianne Lenker – cradle
German Error Message – Hopelessness
Jo Schornikow – Incomplete
Grizzly Coast – Half-Light Boy
Taylor Hamilton – Might Say
Porridge Radio – Give / Take
Patio – Scum
Ruthie – Spirit Now Moves
Esther Rose – Don’t Blame It On the Moon
Blood Cultures – Flowers For All Occasions
Puddle-Cuddle – Compost
Mess – Dead Space
Cry Babe – Soft Honk
The Painters – Pieces of Life
Two Meters – Ground
Erin Durant – Take a Load Off
Michelle Blades – Ring
Eric & Magill – Thanks to Sciences
Foundlings – Caught Up on You
Craig Finn – Something To Hope For
JW Ridley – Homesick (Out The Blue)
Pieket – Eternal Recurrence
The Curfews – Rose
Emily Fairlight – Body Below
Raggedy – Brainwash
Barrie – Saturated
Blush – Forever Is a Long Time
Shane Leonard – Empire Builder
Con Davison – Sofa Bed
Gold Light + Snakemusk – The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
The Chats – Pub Feed
Shutups – Yellowjacket
Izzy Heltai – Stuck In Stone
Adam Ostrar – Take It Back
The Death Of Pop – Last
Toledo – Some Samurai
Yot Club – Japan
Evan Thomas Way & The Phasers – Long Distance
K. Campbell – Heads Up
The Duke of Norfolk – As the Heralds Revere You
Leaky Engine-John Birch Society Blues
naps – treading
Vieo Abiungo – What the Rain Restores
Old Earth – The Friends ∴ The Gods
Good Good Blood & Astral Social Club – Heathen Astronaut

Like what you hear? Catch up with the rest of our Monthly Mixes!

The post April 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.

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