Familiarity can go a long way to diminish the effects of ambiguity. By now, 40 days into this Lent Series, we’re accustomed to the fact that immersing oneself within Christopher McFall‘s work is to enter a dark world of shapes moving in shadows, where sounds hint, suggest and allude, but rarely evoke, state or refer. The tension of this world is reinforced by the knowledge that what we’re hearing derives from field recordings, exacerbated by the often strongly referential titles he bestows on his work. However, spend long enough in a deep cave, and we gradually become dark-adapted. That’s how it seems to me with McFall’s work; that the everyday, tangible world from whence the recordings came has been inverted, abstracted, othered, becoming a labyrinthine multiverse of microcosms, alternate manifestations of a common creative impulse.
All of which makes Disengaged Songs for Disenchanted Lovers rather startling, as it’s one of the very few McFall albums not simply to suggest human activity, but to clearly feature the human voice. Not at first, though, not for a while, and not for long.
Initially, opening track ‘Awestruck, The Liar’ takes us back to a place of extant music, a short, distorted mono loop, like a laboured kind of breathing. Noise faintly materialises, widening to stereo, with traces of possible movement and distant, bird-like chirps. We crossfade back into mufflement, as if the breathing had been taken over by an equally laboured machine. The end is inscrutable, a new loop that feels as if it should be tangible but remains stubbornly obtuse. From the outset, then, nothing sounds comfortable.
‘One For Your Meandering Drunk Wallows’ feels immediately less claustrophobic, a wide open space with horn-like calls and light pattering. The ambiance recedes to reveal a female voice, singing a short phrase (a “disengaged song”?) as if to herself. After just a few seconds she vanishes, making us wonder if we imagined her, replaced by a slow, buzzy bass oscillation while the habitat softly ticks over. In turn a male voice appears, echoing the woman, who returns to form a brief alternating duet – though it sounds artificial, their voices seeming spliced rather than actually being together (“disenchanted lovers”?). Meanwhile the environment around them tellingly becomes a broken, halting piano, blurting phrases suggesting it’s trying in vain to keep going. Within McFall’s uniquely umbral soundworld this is a strange, unsettling manifestation of lyricism, phantasmic echoes of melody emerging from unseen walls.
The third part has one of McFall’s most potent titles, ‘The Wide-Eyed Love That Dribbles Tears Down Dusted Cheeks’, suggesting both innocence and ruins. That in itself makes me reflect more on the nature of the ‘song’ from before, and indeed the music is here is emphatically ruminative. In front of gentle crackle, a slowly intoned phrase loops solemnly, the possible bassline for a now-vanished melody. It elaborates slightly, becomes semi-absorbed into the noise, but what emerges is a perfect fifth – sounding like voices – hovering in space. Everything here is in harmony, but as if to evade that the bassline shifts down (also by a fifth), again becoming partly embedded into the soft surrounding turbulence. This track is one of McFall’s simplest and most beautiful creations, conveying a kind of muted devastation, with that brief hovering fifth providing another vestige, or figment, of human presence.
By now we’re in a place that, even by McFall’s standards, is more than usually dark and emotionally-charged. There’s something savage about the title of the final part, ‘You’ll Love Her Until The Birds Pick Your Bones Clean, Now Won’t You’, progressing from dust-covered destruction to death and decay. Disturbingly, it’s as if we’ve been thrown back to the start of the album, with a new, even more hobbled mono vinyl loop barely giving enough of a glimpse of its actual music through the crackle and thuds. Again as at the start, its narrow field is expanded, this time by a pitched noise band that wipes out the loop. Passing through blankness we end up in the opposite, a swelling buzzy drone with tangible traces of what appears to be a huge amount of activity, struggling to be heard, semi-submerged in textural smog. Tones protrude, dramatically triggered by muffled drum strikes (faintly redolent of Kreng), bringing the album to a close with an air of both ritual and absolute finality.
Disengaged Songs for Disenchanted Lovers was originally released in September 2012 as an MP3 download by the Mexican Mandorla netlabel. Following the usual pattern, Mandorla became defunct a couple of years later, the website going offline during the latter half of 2014. Having been unavailable for nearly 11 years, Christopher McFall has re-released the album today, via his Bandcamp site.
[…] it can be heard as a direct continuation from Disengaged Songs For Disenchanted Lovers (explored last time), with its first part, ‘Braids of the Wire’, beginning with looping drum strikes, […]