Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor aka Sublamp has been releasing records since 2007 on Serac (USA), Pehr (USA), SEM (France), Dragon’s Eye Recordings (USA), Friendly Virus (Portugal), Ahora Eterno (Argentina) and Hibernate Recordings (UK).
“In Our Hidding Voice” is his sixth release which displays drones and heavy and saturated guitar and other elements.
Different layers of dense and abrasive noises create a dark atmosphere of isolationism, a perfect soundtrack for spectral and hazy landscapes.
‘We Sleep in a Room-Shaped Hole’ craft in the very deep soul of the track, a hidden melody that unfolds a subtle shape of beauty.
“String Trails” moves into a more ambient composition while “Corner Ghost” shows a granular texture that draws a different picture in the album.
‘Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet’ with its unsteady resonance puts tension and balance to the celestial drones of ‘Hiding Song’, the last cut of the album. Delicate!
- Loop
Sublamp’s ‘In Our Hiding Voice’ occupies a desolate nether zone between doom metal, ambient/noise and drone. In the company of Hibernate records’ roster it strikes us as one of their darker releases. From isolationist opener ‘Understairs’, the low frequency rumble and viscous haar of ‘Dear Carpetfoot’ looms into view, perhaps sharing a kindred, blackened soul with Danny Saul’s ‘Kinison - Goldthwait’ album, while ‘We Sleep In A Room-Shaped Hole’ masterfully holds us in suspense with glowering post-industrial drones akin to the work of Lustmord. The grainy friction and shadowy serendipity of ‘Corner Ghost’ sounds like a paranormal EVP recording, something perhaps also hinted at in ‘Girl, Calling To An Empty House’ whereas ‘the penultimate track ‘Cut A Door Where The Walls Meet’ is more concerned with creating a furrow of subbass oscillations gradually smudged with the hum and buzz of raw, droning electricity.
- Boomkat
Using only guitars and saturation devices, all run back and forth between tube amps and a broken reel-to-reel, Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor aka Sublamp presents ten heavily textured tracks, conjuring up dark atmospheres, inspired in part from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and its desolated industrial foggy landscapes.
Assembled from cut-up drones and amplified guitar noises, In Our Hiding Voice strikes immediately by its visceral quality and dark edges. Surfaces are raw and abrasive but upon closer examination display mesmerising minute details that invite to listen those heavy soundscapes more attentively. With dense layers of reverberated sonic haze, We Sleep in a Room-Shaped Hole displays a vertiginous depth that develops even further as the track progresses, showing Connor’s understated talent for crafting complex arrangements and creating very unusual spaces.
On first listen of this record, the atmosphere seems almost suffocating and foreboding but, with time, tracks like String Trails or Girl, Calling to an Empty House assume a more immersive character and give an interesting perspective to the album. One standout track is Corner Ghost where Connor eschews his trademark saturated looped guitar drones and goes for different textures and colours, lighter and brighter in a way but making this short piece menacing and sombre – a welcome exploration towards altogether different territories.
One of the highlights of this unusual and really excellent record is probably the wonderfully titled Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet. Connor here gathers momentum and goes for a long stroll between light and shadow. The sculptural work at play is phenomenal and gives a real thickness to the music.
With In Our hiding Voice, Hibernate adds a very different album to its catalogue, giving people who follow the label very interesting new directions to explore. But, Ryan Connor’s work is above all a superb study on abrasive yet immersive shapes and structures. Highly recommended.
“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.
Another excellent new release from Hibernate Recordings. Sublamp is Ryan Connor, a sound and video artist, who’s released some excellent work through Ahora Eterno, SEM, Dragon’s Eye, Friendly Virus, Pehr and Serac. According to Hibernate, ‘In Our Hiding Voice’ is “centered around the kind of listening one might engage in whilst hiding from something or someone, perhaps hiding in empty buildings, underground tunnels or dark rooms in abandoned houses…” That makes sense, because most of the pieces here involve half-heard details wrapped in warm, scuffed drones and crackles that might come from fluffy gramophone needles, faulty air-conditioning, the wind, underground water – you get the idea. At one point I was sharply and uncomfortably reminded of a childhood experience of being under general anaesthetic. It’s an immersive experience, and not an altogether comfortable one at times, but the music demands attention and concentration, and the shortness of the tracks means that none of them outstays its welcome or outlives the usefulness of its primary motif. Recommended.
The timbre of the sounds within In Our Hiding Voice are relatively unusual and what may well be mistaken as analogue synthesizers or computer algorithms are in fact several hours of electric guitar recordings painstakingly melded into a collage of sound. Nurturing the elements which musicians often avoid, such as hiss, static and feedback hum, Connor even employs a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a deliberately damaged record head, for the purpose of creating his beautifully marred audio. The effort and time expended by Connor is not in vain and one is made aware of both the remarkable density within the ten tracks which comprise this album and also of their originality.
Opening with the dark and immersive Understairs, the album then descends into a dystopian world marked by dirges and clashes of distorted sound. The tracks are quite short and so pass quickly and noisily, with hints of melody beneath the surface occasionally coming to the fore. Though In Our Hiding Voices is perhaps a more challenging listen than much of the music released on Hibernate recently, it is all the more rewarding for it.
When you really listen to this album a second or third time you get so much more out of it. At first I thought it was just going to be an album of industrial noise, but it really goes much deeper than that and has a peculiar narrative that only becomes apparent with close listening. I was also surprised to find that the album has no synthesiser input whatsoever given that all of the sounds are typical of these instruments. In fact the majority of the sounds derive from Electric Guitar run through a Fender tube amp, recorded to tape, looped and passed through an amp again!
This is a fascinating album which is likely to remain one of the most unusual experimental works of the year. It will have you hitting the play button many times over as you explore the complex textures of this unusual sonic territory.
Wednesday Feb 2 12:00am