April 1998
Oh ho ho, Hoity Toity Retrospective Person, you say, you confidently and triumphantly declared the Space Era dead last week, so why haven’t you posted an intro to the Alternative Era yet?
Because dead things leave corpses that need to be disposed of…and this particular corpse is still twitching. (We’ll get to that in a few weeks.) We’re in a transitional period, at the moment. The Alternative Era is still under construction, and won’t be completed and ready for showtime until the release of Stupid Dream next year.
That bit of housekeeping done, Bass Communion. The old line is “one can measure a circle starting anywhere,” and when it came time to kill the Space Era, Wilson’s circle started at Nine Cats. First released in 1983 as a gleefully monstrous sixties-psychedelia-by-way-of-Marillion behemoth on the good half of Karma’s The Joke’s On You. Shrunken and stripped down for 1991’s The Nostalgia Factory and shuffled into 1992’s On the Sunday of Life. Reached its final form in a fully acoustic rendition for 1997’s Insignificance. A perfect synecdoche for both the Space Era in all its glory and also, in the end, a harbinger of what would supplant it.
So what’s missing? What did the circle skip over that allows a project like this to slink into existence?
Back again we go to Steven Wilson’s Home Movies. The narrative is that Bass Communion sprung, indirectly, from Altamont, and anyone who’s actually listened to Prayer for the Soul would be justified in doing a double take here. Altamont was experimental in the two-kids-screwing-around-with-homemade-recording-equipment sense, not the tape-loops-of-field-recordings sense. It’s only upon reading an old interview of Wilson’s where he says that Bass Communion and Altamont share the same set of influences that things click into place. Altamont is Babby Steven and Babby Simon ripping off the Alte Deutsche Meister wholesale, whereas Bass Communion is Adult Steven abstractly picking at what made them worth ripping off wholesale fifteen years ago in the first place.
So here we are, Bass Communion’s been quietly rolling out new soundscapes for four years and we finally have a debut album. Five tracks, most of them long. We dive in with Shopping, the only short song, serving as a slightly snarky introduction to the project. (Toccata and Fugue kicks in about a second before the song ends.) And after this, the goods.
The other four songs are ambient droney numbers that generally start out with a sample or a field recording and let sounds naturally silt into something coherent. Orphan Coal is instructive. Starts with a JBK-esque drum loop, overlaid with, in order, short female vocal samples, reversed tape loops, quietly unsettling Jonny Greenwood-esque strings, dissonant choruses, some rumbly Mick Karn-esque bass work, and finally some additional eerie synth work spread on top. The song it’s most similar to is Boards of Canada’s Jacquard Causeway, in the way every new element is at first introduced prominently and then slowly integrated into the song as a whole to make room for the next new element, ultimately making the song conclude at a completely different place from where it started. In Orphan Coal’s case, it started grubby and earthy, but ended somewhere creepy but airy. The other songs on this album are like this, too, but here is where the structure—and thus Wilson’s objective of abstracting music as much as possible—is most apparent.
Pulling apart a song like this has its own advantages in the particular mental images they evoke in the listener. Here, we turn instead to Sleep, Etc, the dystopian, quietly surreal adventure immediately preceding Orphan Coal. My notes for this song, verbatim:
- beginning at least: burbling, discordant
- like someone trying to evade the secret police by tromping through a swamp in a thunderstorm
- droning police airships with searchlights overhead
- (they’re getting closer)
- (and they’re armed)
- (they move like giant mechanical jellyfish)
Pure paranoia fuel, right here. And that’s something slower, more ambient music has typically been good at. What’s scary isn’t the giant clown monster with fangs and cracked makeup, cackling madly in your face. What’s scary is what’s implied to lurk just out of frame, the things about which we cannot speak. The clown can be killed. The ghosts in your peripheral vision can’t. (cf. Sicknote)
But all of this is prelude to the album’s centerpiece, the first two-thirds of the Drugged suite, the centerpieces of which are some seriously airy keyboard work and Theo Travis’ incredible soprano sax. And, oh yes, here’s where Theo Travis is formally introduced to the blog and begins with Wilson what would become a very fruitful two-decade collaboration. He is characteristically excellent here, beginning with what feels like lonely whalesong. But then more sax samples are laid on top, along with some lovely synth organ in the background, and everything resolves into something more melodic, tranquil yet oddly tumultuous, and deeply, thickly nostalgic. It is, if we may be trite for a second, the music of nature. And then at about eleven minutes some distorted, fuzzed-out electric guitars fade in, and for a moment they sound like breaking waves, and everything clicked into place.
Once in a while my family will go to South Carolina for vacation. It’s rare that I tag along, because I usually have obligations. I don’t remember what they were for this particular trip, I suspect it had something to do with college, but either way I wasn’t there. But this one particular time they came back with a story: they were relaxing on the beach, and they hear this music. And some distance away there’s this guy standing on the beach with a trombone. He’s facing the water and playing something wistful and melancholy, similar, I imagine, to what Travis is doing here, and it sounded absolutely beautiful. But no one wanted to go up to him and tell him that, because it was also very clear that why he was there and why he was playing that music was something deeply and profoundly personal to him, and interrupting him would have ruined the moment.
It feels like something similar happened with the Drugged suite. On all three parts, but especially on the first, it feels like we have seen, in some oblique way, a chunk of Steven Wilson’s soul. We’ve borne witness to something uniquely special here, and all told, that’s not a bad way to kick a project off.
- Bass Communion I
Catalogue. Preserve. Amass. 