A group that i’ve come back to time and time again over the years is Natural Snow Buildings. A duo comprising French musicians Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, they mingle elements of folk, ambient and psychedelia. The result is a heady mixture that consistently falls somewhere between song, trance and ritual, and that’s absolutely what typifies their 2014 album The Night Country.
Even though the 11 tracks on The Night Country each position themselves quite clearly as song, trance or ritual, the real power of the album – and of Natural Snow Buildings’ music in general – is in the long-term juxtaposition of these elements. i’ve rarely had the sense from their work that any particular track should be listened to in isolation; this is album music, designed to be heard as the cumulative effect of this pull between discrete but sympathetic emphases. What unites everything is a sense of focus: song, trance and ritual all cycle round, pulling us into their repetition and stasis, in the process elevating the experience into something more than the sum of its parts.
What lies in store is established immediately at the start of The Night Country. An intense 3-minute buzzing drone piece, ‘No Light Pollution’ takes us into a place of shadows and unsettling portents, though its soundworld has the brightness of overexposed moonlight. It’s followed by ‘Where Your Body Split’, not so much a song as a gentle folk refrain, leading into ‘Weird Meetings at the Water Castle’, a short response with a drone more implied than heard, over which light clanking metal and swirling watery noise trickles.
This is the paradigm of The Night Country, though it becomes increasingly lengthy and heightened as it continues. ‘You’ll Become What You Fear the Most’ is another dronescape, caught between feeling active and passive, encouraging a meditative state. Subdued piano notes toll in the depths, assorted stringed instruments meander in a narrow harmonic space, caught in a cycling rapture. The track coalesces around a rotating simple pattern, the impetus of which shifts its tone to feel more ritual-like, not remotely passive any longer, subsequently evaporating once its charms have done their work. Again, a more immediate, closely-miced song follows: ‘Eli’s Song’, the vocals of which are so sweet and tender i keep imagining a sweeping accompaniment will suddenly emerge and bathe them in richness – but no, their reverie is kept beautifully plain and is all the better for it. And again, what follows the song is another piece, ‘Season of the Slasher’, that returns us to the dream-like world of meditation and ritual.
What’s so impressive and effective about these locked-in rapturous tracks is the way they never sound arbitrary or indifferent, but manage to find a way to be simultaneously relaxed and focused. That’s especially true of the album’s longest tracks. At over 17 minutes, ‘Rusty Knives Valley’ comes as a surprise, seemingly expanding the scope of the music in the wake of six much shorter tracks. Yet its narrative still traverses the same landscape, here transformed into a synthesis where the elements of the music all interpenetrate one another. This is even more the case in ‘Sandman Traps’, also around 17 minutes long and which begins as a simple song before expanding out into a lengthy mysterious drone texture laden with small elements that slowly sing, rock, turn and glance against its surface.
The title track and ‘Sister Ritual’ explore shorter contemplative spaces, the former a gentle stasis where noise is eventually erased to reveal a lovely overlapping melodic tracery, the latter going the other way, a juddering fundamental (not loud but forceful) underpinning music that evokes the unsettling tone of ‘No Light Pollution’, given a harder edge that conflicts with soft tendrils of line that are themselves erased before the end.
The album’s denouement, ‘Gothic Suburbia’ is perhaps its most enigmatic track. Faint traces of something lyrical in the middle distance appear to come closer but remain far off, tilting lightly around a focal point, yet everything feels electrified (again, active never passive). Two minutes before the end, it abruptly pulls out, leaving vocal strands exquisitely floating in reverberance.
Originally released as one of Natural Snow Buildings’ typically ultra-limited edition CDs (in this case, just 50 copies, sold during their 2014 European tour), The Night Country was subsequently re-released as a free download from Vulpiano Records.
