Audiopile Review: Vancouver’s own Scott Morgan, aka Loscil, has amassed a large, varied discography since his 2001 debut for Kranky. That album, ‘Triple Point’, announced a major new talent, and a distinctive new voice, in electronic music. Previously, Morgan had been best known as the drummer in Destroyer. But ‘Triple Point’ showed an absolute mastery of electro-acoustic sound design and dub-techno dynamics. Layering densely textured drones over hypnotic glitch rhythms, he created music that was blissfully enveloping but abstractly tense. While Loscil music has covered a lot of ground in the past quarter-century, that fundamental aesthetic ambiguity has remained its north star. And it’s very much present on Loscil’s latest Kranky album, our record of the week, ‘Lake Fire’. Here, that ambiguity focuses on the concept of wildfires. These are, after all, natural phenomena, and part of an essential regenerative process. They’re also inherently terrifying, and even more so with human-caused fires running out of control, aided by climate change. Many a Loscil album has had a conceptual underpinning of this sort, but it’s more usually been something relatively abstract from science or architecture. On ‘Lake Fire’, things get real. This is clearly something Morgan has wrestled with. The album was originally conceived as a collaboration with an instrumental ensemble. But, in his determination to get it right, everything but a bit of double bass was jettisoned, for a more starkly electronic sound. The results are, in part, a return to the inky, occluded ambient dub of ‘Triple Point’, only with everything Morgan has learned in the interim creating a more dramatic statement. It immediately recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, another geographically specific, concept-heavy electronic music project obsessed with forests. Only, this time, the forest is on fire and the surrounding area is covered in ash. Morgan was right to conclude this should not be an ensemble record. It’s goddamn symphonic! But the orchestra too is on fire, it seems. This is a haunting, heartbreaking sound-world of smoke and, again, so much ash. It also ranks of one of the best albums in that large, varied Loscil discography.

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“To follow up ‘Clara’, an album he’d based on a three-minute sample of a 22-piece string orchestra, Canadian veteran Morgan had originally intended to work with an ensemble. He conceived ‘Lake Fire’ as a suite of electro-acoustic compositions, but abandoned them mid-way through the process – only ‘Ash Clouds’, which features James Meger on double bass, remains in its original form. The album’s focal shift happened when Morgan took a road trip into the mountains and found himself “surrounded by the ominous proximity of wildfires and dense smoke”, an experience he describes as “celebrating life while the world burns.” So the album is treated as a phoenix of sorts – there’s a silhouette of the original record present in the background somewhere, but it’s obscured by Morgan’s foggy, overpainted new elements.

And musically, it’s the most stirring material Morgan’s written in ages. The experience of seeing the landscape he loves burning clearly impacted him, and you can hear how that’s informed the compositions. There’s no grand design to opening track ‘Arrhythmia’, Morgan smudges out his recordings with splices and overdubs, creating rhythms from loop-scrubbed pads and grainy, greyscale textures. It sounds as if we’re looking through clouds of smoke and hearing harmonies hum from the distance. ‘Candling’ is even better, something like Akira Yamaoka’s iconic ‘Silent Hill’ soundtrack – it’s not lost on us that the game is famously obscured by fog – set to a chilly dub meter, and on ‘Silos’, Morgan fades in acidic interlocking rhythms and risers, suggesting the existence of dance music without confirming anything specific.” -Boomkat