Sublamp – In Our Hiding Voice

“Too noisy to be ambient, and too static to be noise. Drone seems like a pretty apt description, yeah drone is good enough. Drone Noise perhaps? No, sounds a bit too pretentious. Who cares about genres or tags anyway? This is good music and that’s all that should count”…

That was my stream of thought during almost every listen of Ryan Connor’s (Sublamp) new album and Hibernate’s first release of the new year. In Our Hiding Voice continues to build on the sound established by the label in almost all of its releases, that sense of disturbing quietude that thrives on elevating the audience’s sense of tension. Another common factor amongst most of their releases is that underlying sense of discovery of new terrain or emotion. Marta Mist’s Distance/Skeletal/Union and Clem Leek’s Holly Lane are two prime examples of such. Marta Mist continuously unleashed their music, element by element, in controlled fashion until they set everything alight and lifted the fog from all surrounding it to give us a finale of grand proportions, whereas Clem Leek rocked the listener back and forth between the mysterious, the tense and the outright beautiful.

Sublamp’s approach, however, is a bit different. Classical instruments make no appearance at any point during the record and the sounds are all manipulations of guitar noises passed through a tube amp. This creates a very thick layer of sound, one that is as harsh as it is abrasive, a continuum of evolving noise so to speak. The album begs to be played at higher volumes so as to appreciate it to the fullest and to avoid losing track of the finer details buried beneath the blanket of woven static that remains throughout the ten tracks comprising In Our Hiding Voice.

The first album that comes to mind on listening to this is Bass Communion’s Molotov and Haze, but on further listens Lustmord’s darker albums become another obvious benchmark to compare this album to. But where these two artists succeed in combining various elements and arranging them in a manner that keeps the listener enticed as the album moves on is where the biggest weakness of Sublamp’s effort lies. Some points in the album seem like they expose the artist’s loss of new ideas or inability to build on the successes of the previous tracks. Such is the case with “Corner ghost” and “Tunnels” whose placement in the order of things makes very little sense and brings the experience of listening to the album down quite a bit, the drones are quite repetitive and even on multiple listens very few surprises or memorable parts appear until they fade away,

Track length also seems to have a direct effect on the quality of the tracks in the album. Connor seems to be much more at ease in crafting longer tracks than shorter ones. Penultimate track “Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet” as well as the finale “Hiding Song” are the only two crossing the five minute mark on the album and they are those who portray Sublamp at his best. The space he gives himself on these tracks allows him to expand on the sound, create a world out of thin air and in a way pass that feeling of being stalked and attempting to hide that the album is based upon to the listener. Even his abilities as a producer are much more apparent on these two tracks than the shorter ones. The reverbed soundscapes lurking below the waves of guitar noise in “Hiding Song”  are perfectly executed and the turbulence of “Cut a Door…” is probably the highlight of the whole experience.

At this point in time, Connor seems like he’s still in the process of honing and improving his skills both as a writer and a producer, and if these last two tracks are anything to go by, then probably his next release would be something that better shows his full potential. Just a bit of expansion on each song’s narrative would do a world of difference.

- Review by Mohammed Ashraf for Fluid Radio

Available through Hibernate Recordings

www.sublamp.com
www.hibernate-recs.co.uk