(2021) A Winged Victory for the Sullen - Invisible Cities


Review:
A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the neo-classical duo consisting of Dustin O’Halloran and Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie, were commissioned to compose the score to a Leo Warner-directed multimedia stage production based on Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities. The 90-minute show premiered at the Manchester International Festival in July 2019, and was scheduled for a worldwide tour before COVID-19 derailed the plans. The duo released a 42-minute studio album of material drawn from the production, and the music easily stands out on its own, even without the choreography and high-res video projections. O’Halloran and Wiltzie have scored numerous films and dance pieces before, and as with previous AWVFTS efforts, they seem uninterested in following typical cinematic clichés with their work. The piano melody of the glacial opener “So That the City Can Begin to Exist” shifts into focus several minutes into the piece, when one isn’t expecting it, and doesn’t swell up into a grand crescendo when it seems like it’s about to. Other tracks gradually apply frayed, shoegaze-like distortion to ethereal choirs and celestial horns, reflecting the composers’ backgrounds in alternative and experimental music and adding a haunting edge. A few moments have a sort of gothic beauty to them, like the swaying pizzicatos of “Nothing of the City Touches the Earth” or the chilling, fluttering “Thirteenth Century Travelogue.” After the clear, resonant emotional peak “Only Strings and Their Supports Remain,” the album gets darker, more disorienting, and even more unstable. “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” is tense and shivering at the start, then erupts with electrifying static near the end, and “Despair Dialogue” inserts smoldering feedback into a cavernous soundscape. “Total Perspective Vortex” is truly hair-raising, gradually piling on evil-sounding guitars, reversed effects, and ghostly voices before it all reaches a standstill and slowly lingers to a soft coda.





Tracklist:
01 - So That the City Can Begin to Exist (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
02 - The Celestial City (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
03 - The Dead Outnumber the Living (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
04 - Every Solstice & Equinox (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
05 - Nothing of the City Touches the Earth (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
06 - Thirteenth Century Travelogue (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
07 - The Divided City (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
08 - Only Strings and Their Supports Remain (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
09 - There Is One of Which You Never Speak (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
10 - Despair Dialogue (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
11 - The Merchants of Seven Nations (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
12 - Desires Are Already Memories (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)
13 - Total Perspective Vortex (feat. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran)


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits