You could reasonably argue that all ambient music seeks in some way to lull its listener into a meditative haze, and some artists pursue this feeling more directly than others. Scott Morgan is one of those guys. Unlike Tim Hecker or Pantha du Prince, who draw from more intricate arrangements, Morgan lays his sounds bare and lets them go right to work. Recording as Loscil since the early 2000s, he's built an impressive catalogue of pensive, minimal records that turn computerized sounds into something strangely soothing-- the kind of music you want to listen to flat on your back, eyes fixed at the ceiling. While each of his records is at least good, it started to feel by 2006's Plume like Morgan had reached a creative plateau.
His latest effort, Endless Falls, breathes some new life into the Loscil project. Not so much a departure but a natural progression of what he cooked up with early albums Triple Point and Submers, the record is again a concept piece. At its most basic, the idea here is that Endless Falls is a rainy-day album, overcast but cozy, and there's an aquatic theme that extends to its cover art and the rain-droplet field recordings that bookend the record. Morgan plays with the idea of water-as-sound throughout and pulls it off in appealing ways. "Shallow Water Blackout" is kind of liquid headphone music that swooshes from ear to ear, and the very good "Dub for Cascadia" is, as you might expect, an exercise in deeply submerged, underwater dub.
Sometimes conceptual ambient albums can feel a bit forced-- Klimek's recent film-centric Movies Is Magic comes to mind-- but here the theme works hand-in-hand with the music. Morgan breaks with the concept for the final track, though, for one of the album's most interesting moments. "The Making of Grief Point" is a spoken-word piece featuring Destroyer's Dan Bejar (Morgan also plays drums in that band) about the struggles of the creative process. Bejar's voice comes as a shock after 50 some-odd minutes of gentle atmospherics, and he speaks about feeling conflicted and confused about making art. "I have lost interest in music", he says. "It is horrible." It's very a strange way to close out an album like this, but confident, I think, to punctuate it so forcefully. You're at ease for a time and then yanked back into the real world-- don't all good records end like that?
