Last week I had a spill. And when I say, ‘had a spill’, I mean I fell down hard. Fell in a way that I imagine the elderly fall, like a grain silo toppling over, with no hope for any sort of damage mitigation. As far as glimpses into the not-so-distant future (when I will no longer have the luxury of time and semi-resilient bones) go, it kinda sucked. It’s funny, though. There was the briefest moment, hung up in between having begun to fall and having fallen, that became like a thousand more: this moment of fatal awareness. Though time had all but stopped, there was nothing I could do to save myself. I could not twist nor turn nor Matrix myself into uprightness. I was going down and I knew it and it was hilarious. A sort of euphoria swept over me. And then I crashed, thunderously, to the ground. My cat, lying in his usual spot next to the stereo speakers, skittered away to hide under the sofa. I was prone on the rug for a while, not too badly hurt, laughing.
Smote’s fourth LP, A Grand Stream, calls that fall to mind. This is, of course, a compliment. Smote is (mostly) Daniel Foggin, and the music he makes is, loosely speaking, heavy, droning, repetitive, psychedelic folk music. We could quibble about this, sure, but there’s no denying it can feel like Fairport or Pentangle inverted. Endless, sunless, semi-sour, and boggy. Again, a compliment. Foggin himself cites Pärson Sound / International Harvester / Träd Gräs Och Stenar, Tony Conrad, Phil Niblock, and Kali Malone among his influences, which seems about right. Because this stuff is all about time and tension. And taking a beating.
The six, thickly layered longform jams that make up A Grand Stream often dwell in that grey area between having begun to fall and having fallen. Which is to say, though the music is obviously durational – or perhaps intended to be endured – it never quite feels like a succession of seconds, one after another, amounting to minutes. At times, it can feel like that infinitesimally brief moment I mentioned above – neither a start nor an end – stretched forever, poised mid-air, until overlaid upon itself again and again like temporal ribbon candy. But inevitably, that permanence is illusory, reality kicks in, and down you go. Still, there’s a weird ecstasy in that. In the knowing and in the collision with the ground itself. Openers ‘Sitting Stone Pt.1’ and ‘Sitting Stone Pt. 2’ are like this, functioning in much the same way as doom metal. Certainly, they’re equally acquainted with low end – Smote just has more fiddles and flutes. Anyhow, here, as in doom, the riff is the thing. You can sense it coming. The riff is the floor, and it’s just a matter of when it hits you in the face. Then, it hits you again and again and again. You never quite get to the point where you’re lying prone on deep shag.
That’s pretty much how A Grand Stream feels most of the time: not-a-beginning, not-an-ending moments repeated relentlessly, looping ruthlessly. This is not passive music. Nor is this music you observe. This is music you occupy. You place yourself in it, among it. And there, I’m reminded of the odd brutality of visiting La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House in New York. Me, on the verge of panicking, bathed in queasy magenta light, barraged as I was by Young’s blaring sine waves. Soon, though, the effect of the onslaught reversed itself in my brain. It became somehow soothing, being in the midst of it. No question, it was meditative. So it is here, with quarter-hour behemoths ‘Coming Out Of A Hedge Backwards’ and ‘The Opinion Of The Lamb’ parts one and two.
These tracks remind me also of a friend whose art practice consisted of drawing the same tiny figures repeatedly, exactingly, over wide swaths of canvas and paper. It seemed like a Zen thing maybe. Meaningless gestures made meaningful through repetition. Of course, you supply the meaning. Or maybe the meaning was for him alone? Or in the doing? With songs, obviously, you don’t need to be quite so abstract about it. It would be a stretch, however, to describe any of A Grand Stream’s compositions as something a normal person would describe as a proper song. Where there are words, they are swept up in, and more or less drowned out by the storm around them. Which is not to say they aren’t important. Spice in the sauce, as it were. Anyway, I really liked my friend’s work. There was an undeniability about it: the way the figures, drawn by an imperfect hand, began to subtly shift and skew as they simultaneously gained a weightiness through accumulation. A critic, looking at them, once thought they were having an acid flashback.
Here, ‘Coming Out Of A Hedge Backwards’ scrawls tracers across the stereo field. They swirl around its heavy, barbarian riff like smoke figures, like sparklers writing in the dark, like disembodied lanterns in an impenetrably dense forest. And this track is dense, so dense as to seem permanent, immovable, monumental. I once saw footage of an enormous, power-generating windmill that had been struck by lightning. The blades of this giant thing were on fire, spinning, drawing loops of smoke in the air over and over, until they drooped and stopped abruptly, still smoldering. The tower, unmovable, standing there, probably forever. ‘Coming Out Of A Hedge Backwards’ is that windmill burning spirals in the sky, almost exactly.
Last Saturday, maybe an hour or so after my fall, the ibuprofen kicked in. I sat down in my front room and cast A Grand Stream to my stereo speakers for the first time. I turned it up loud. I was struck immediately by the paradoxical joyfulness at the heart of this record, the clear (somewhat dark) enthusiasm at its heart, in its performances. It is infectious, in its way. As I was listening, my cat, himself a repetitive drone enjoyer, emerged from his hiding place and padded over to his normal perch in front of the stereo. Assessing the sounds spewing out from the box, he spun in a little circle and leaned over, far to the left, his two right legs barely touching the ground. He stayed, suspended in that way, for little more than a second, but the moment seemed a lot longer than that. Suddenly, he flopped over with a soft thud. Tilting his ears toward the speaker, he tuned in. (Let it be known, my cat has great taste.)
It is not lost on me, as I write this, that one would be hard-pressed to release an album more tailor-made for tQ than A Grand Stream. It is folk and psych and metal and drone all at once. It is standing stones and ruins. Folklore and folk horror. It would be easy to draw parallels to Sunn O))), to Gnod, to UKAEA, to Liars, to any number of tQ favourites. Even Sea Power, were I to reach. I could write about Oneida’s ‘Sheets Of Easter’ for the ten millionth time. Really, the only thing it’s missing is some connection to Suede. To me, that’s beautiful. It’s not as if Foggin was screaming for attention. It’s not as if he had some sort of grand plan, some serial-killer corkboard, twine running from peg to peg. I can’t imagine these ecstatic expulsions being contrived for cash or clicks or cred or streams. No, this is something else altogether, an elemental expression, created for its own sake, conceived on a farm by a stream. Amen and cheers to that.
