(2021) Shackleton - Departing Like Rivers


Review:
Shackleton’s work is so diffuse and so challenging that finding an entry point can be like feeling out a foothold in a sheer granite wall. His last solo full-length, 2012’s Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs, sprawled to more than two hours. His earlier work, astonishing as it often is, still reflects the dubstep roots he would eventually shed in order to make his best and most unclassifiable music. And his recent output has been mostly in tandem with other artists: an album of goblin chants with Anika, a free-jazz excursion with Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel, a collection of eccentric prog-dub poetry with opera firebrand Ernesto Tomasini. All of this stuff is profoundly idiosyncratic and rarely makes for an easy listen; none of these albums could really be said to be “representative.” It adds up to one of the most daunting catalogs in electronic music. Departing Like Rivers, Shackleton’s first solo album since Music for the Quiet Hour, feels like a re-introduction. It traverses seven tracks in 63 minutes, hardly a casual commitment but a lot easier to experience in one sitting. More subdued than most of Shackleton’s work, it bypasses a lot of the potentially alienating moments that sometimes result from his determination to go out on a limb. The hokey spoken-word passages that tripped up Music for the Quiet Hour are mostly absent, and there’s nothing as potentially divisive as Tomasini’s gravitas-laden quaver. But if some of the fringes of Shackleton’s sound have been shaved away, the center is intact, pulsing like the heart of a malevolent sun about to go supernova. This is heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, heavy on bells, hand drums, and far-off metallic scrapes. The air is always thick with the residual decay from a struck cymbal or gong, and something is usually droning ominously in the background. A litany of apocalyptic sampled voices (“the sky is about to burst”; “overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth”) gives the music an occultist, Coil-like mystique. The producer claims to have incorporated bits of old British folk songs into these tracks, and though you’d need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Child ballads to pick them out, something still seems ancient about this music, as if Shackleton has opened a portal to the foggiest parts of Britain’s past. – Pitchfork





Track Listing:
1.Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water 12:55
2.The Turbulent Sea 11:54
3.Shimmer, then Fade 05:04
4.One of us Escaped 08:26
5.The Light that was Hidden 06:34
6.Few Are Chosen 03:15
7.Transformed Into Love 14:01


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Country: Germany
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