(2021) William Ryan Fritch - Built Upon a Fearful Void          


Review:
Built Upon a Fearful Void is the final album in the Lost Tribe Sound series of the same name. ‘Built Upon a Fearful Void’, a double album from William Ryan Fritch. ‘Built Upon a Fearful Void’ was an album seemingly fated to never be completed. For the last 8 years the album had been recorded and either lost or discarded three times; a leak that water logged and ruined most of the half dozen tape reels the original album was recorded on, a destroyed and unrecoverable hard drive in 2018 that held the near completed mixes and finally in 2021 voluntarily letting go of what remained of the salvaged material to rerecord the album entirely using only faint flickers of the old tapes and cassettes that held the remnants of the old songs. It is a two part record—meditating on lost epochs, feeble mythologies, and the many deep gulfs in human knowledge and perception. Each volume taking the listener through their own unique multi-textured explorations of the union and disunion of sonorities for pipe organ, reed instruments, voice, viola da gamba, prepared piano, pedal steel, viola d’amore and banjo.





Track Listing:

CD1:
1. Seething and Unknowing (06:44)
2. Canary (04:48)
3. Antiphonic (03:35)
4. A Pale Mare (05:05)
5. Glossolalia (04:07)
6. Scythe (05:58)
7. Bitter Tincture (04:24)
8. These Signs Shall Follow (06:00)
9. Truest of Truisms (06:14)

CD2:
1. Low Smoulder (06:26)
2. Critical Mass (04:26)
3. Unthinking Reverence (02:12)
4. The Shallow Well (06:04)
5. Untimely (04:05)
6. Capacitance (03:19)
7. Lay Hands Upon Us (03:16)
8. Interference (03:21)
9. Profoundly False (02:38)
10. The Cooling Board (03:16)
11. A Wilderness to be Suffered (02:27)


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, classical
Country: USA
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


“I don’t know whether this one is concerned with facing existential dread or embracing universal faith, but I do know it’s a deep and consistently satisfying album, at once somber and inspiring.” – Duncan Edwards – BRAINWASHED

“There is a dark, aquatic, slightly claustrophobic element to the music, but it wraps your ears up pleasantly and manages to maintain your attention with all those instruments blending together elegantly.” – Rudy Carrera – MUSIC YOU NEED TO HEAR

“Built on a frightening void, his evolutionary and existential path seems to have reached a balance between the experimentalist euphoria and the harmonic calmness of classicism.” – Maria Balsamo  – IMPATTO SONORO

“Fritch stays away from the near-perfect widescreen cinematic production that is common in modern classical music, using “a mixture of audio fidelities, by using Hi-Fi 24 track decks and old Soviet magnetic wire recorders”. The result is very intimate and spontaneous sounding.” – AMBIENT BLOG