For years, Evan Caminiti has made guitar drone in the duo Barn Owl with Jon Porras; as they've gone along, they've folded more electronics into their heavy soundscapes. He also performs alone: on his last solo ventures—2012's Dreamless Sleep and Night Dust—he used guitars, but ones that were so heavily processed and reconfigured that it wasn't obvious what they were on first or subsequent listens. In a recent interview with Fact he commented on this increased tweaking of the instrument: "I got to a point where I was running it through so many effects pedals that it was basically not even a guitar anymore."
Which leads us to Caminiti's fifth solo album, Meridian, which he composed and performed on modular synthesizer, working in subtle beats, bass tones, hushed noise, and blackened field recordings (you'll have a hard time picking out the field recordings, though, unless we're to assume they were all recorded in a cave in Hell). It's a tight 41 minutes, each of the nine songs featuring a one-word title that evokes the shape or overall texture of a piece ("Arc", "Steam"), the dark eeriness of the album as a whole ("Overtaken", "Curtains"), or the song's ostensible emotional state ("Collapse").
Caminiti has said this material emerged from performing—which he does with live electronics, not a laptop—and that the album's meant to be played loud, so the pulses course through your body. (The title "Meridian" ostensibly references the idea of energy's movement through the body on paths called meridians.) It does work in this regard, but you can also listen closely with headphones; this way, the compositions feel endlessly deep. Many—foggy and droning, always sparkling and elegant—evoke horror films, but not at the moment of attack; it's more the calm seconds after the worst has finally happened and you, as the viewer, feel a sense of relief alongside your quickened pulse. And not all of it's spooky. On his Bandcamp, Caminiti tags the music "devotional," "ambient," "electronic," "experimental," and "noise," and the word that makes the most sense to me from that list is "devotional."
The tracks here are stately and patient. They drift and never feel rushed, and it's easy to lose yourself in them and leave your surroundings a bit while listening. That said, some of it, like the swaggering mid-section of "Collapse", could almost inspire dancing. The noisier "Excelsior" threatens to wake up the neighbors. At times, the tracks are lullabies for dreaming about plastic sheep and at others, they are Tangerine Nightmares.
Many of the songs on Meridian get louder as they go along, but none lose their ghostly, not-all-there vibe. (The song "Steam" really does sound like steam.) Some of the songs may even leave you thinking they could use another element, but in the end, it's nice that they remain as spare as they do, the edges left soft and fuzzy, the way you see things in the dark.
