The Sight Below – It All Falls Apart

The Sight Below’s debut full-length Glider (2008) established the reclusive Seattle-based artist’s singular sound—a haze of treated guitar, a steady electronic pulse, and little else—and his similarly gloomy visual aesthetic.

In the year since Glider’s release, The Sight Below honed his craft and traveled the world, toting his equipment to distant cities and festivals, playing breathtaking audio/visual performances, and wandering off into the night. Evidently, this was time well-spent. With his new album It All Falls Apart, The Sight Below expands upon his strengths at every turn, crafting a paean to impermanence, an ambient meditation that uses the sounds of sadness in the service of sweet emotional catharsis.

Shimmer (extract)

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Unlike Glider, with its loose, semi-improvised feel, It All Falls Apart was carefully plotted from the first note, as the The Sight Below struck up a long-distance collaboration with Simon Scott, former drummer of legendary UK shoegazers Slowdive. (“Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed that I’d be working with a former member of a favorite band,” glows TSB.) The pair work together like old friends, their respective styles intertwining effortlessly—the veteran Scott even brings out a little color in The Sight Below’s dour soundclouds. On It All Falls Apart, The Sight Below’s overcast moods give way to a rainbow (such as it is) of brooding, melancholy textures, incorporating strings, brass, samplers, synthesizers, and vocals into the mix alongside the usual guitars and beats.

New Dawn Fades (extract)

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And yet, for all their darkness, the best moments of It All Falls Apart—the time-release rush of “Stagger”, the serene discord of “Through the Gaps in the Land”, the snowy-day techno of “Burn Me Out from the Inside”, and the aching cover of Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades” (featuring vocals from Jesy Fortino, aka Tiny Vipers)—provide a simultaneous uplift. Maybe it comes from The Sight Below’s evident enjoyment of his time alone, his clear comfort in solitude; and maybe It All Falls Apart is just too damn beautiful to be depressing. – Ghostly

Track List:

1 Shimmer
2 Fervent
3 Through The Gaps In The Land
4 Burn Me Out From The Inside
5 It All Falls Apart
6 New Dawn Fades
7 Stagger

Release Date April 6th on Ghostly International

About The Artist:

The music of The Sight Below conjures half-remembered dreams and soft-focus sentiments with elegiac beauty; his video art works similarly, blurring snippets of film until they’re recognizable only as organic objects: black-and-white amoebas milling about, or a sunset rendered in grayscale.

All of The Sight Below’s songs are performed live: The artist runs E-bowed, slide, and lightly picked guitars through a series of loopers, 12-bit reverb boxes, and delay units, kneading and distending the notes until they drone like bees in a tunnel or keen like an orchestra of singing saws. The resulting swirl is pinned to propulsive, achingly subtle electronic percussion, which guides the listener through the gloom towards the music’s hopeful center. The resulting ambient works seem as effortless as natural phenomena; in fact, they’re carefully played, head-nodding hymns to the artist’s solitary life.

www.myspace.com/thesightbelow
www.ghostly.com