North Carolina based drone label Silber released several records at the end of the year to celebrate the coming of winter. Winter is a very droning time period, and the music that Silber releases pairs well with the gray sameness of the days of the season.
Nonconnah is a duo from Memphis who refer to their work as "Mid-South dronegaze". They consist of Zachary Corsa on guitars and his wife Denny Wilkerson Corsa on field recordings. It's a simple lineup that allows them to make some odd music that ebbs and flows.
There is just under half an hour of music here, in five tracks.
When You Sank Into The Leaf-Strewn Earth starts with a faint rumbling like a flat tire thumping, or a record needle bumping against the center of the record. This is paired with an echoed sample of a woman speaking, like you are at the back of an auditorium and can barely hear a lecture. This vagueness of sounds, in which they are similar yet out of focus and indistinct, is typical of the Nonconnah sound. As the song progresses, the vocal bit ends and strange layers of distortion slide against one another as the needle continues to bounce.
I like the title of track two: When The Blackbirds Formed An Inverted Cross. This is echo and static: an off-channel radio or the pop of a really old record. It is almost eerie.
The eeriness continues for When Your Hands Trembled As You Watched The Barren Fields, a song that consists of a moist electronic rumbling, something that sounds almost back-masked, but it is very indistinct.
A distorted piano looping through some tape hiss makes up When The Ceiling Hit The Floor As The Barn Collapsed Around You, which is like an old recording found somewhere.
And finally the record ends with You Said "The Snow Is Like Amnesia. I'm Forgetting Everything", an awkward title. This is strange sounds and voices with a deep rumbling, and again that echoed piano.
Those descriptions might not sound like much, but Nonconnah are making a pretty minimal style of music. I know that this will not appeal to everyone, or even to most people. But i like to listen to this kind of ambient music as i work, and i find this to be a little more engaging than some releases in this genre.
For those who are interested in looking for this online, a direct link is here. This is also apparently the second in a series of Winter EPs, the first one being from 2016 and located here.
This is very nice and wintery. I hope that Nonconnah keep the series going.
|
