Miscontinuum Album (Fiepblatter Catalogue #3) [Bonus Track Version] [feat. Oval & Dylan Carlson]

Jan St. Werner's Miscontinuum Album is one of those rare records—rare in experimental music, anyway—that needs no context in order to be appreciated, enjoyed, and absorbed. It's all there, right in front of you; to take it in requires only attention and an open mind. That might sound counterintuitive, given the record's actual backstory: It stems from an electronic opera written and performed by St. Werner, with a libretto by Markus Popp, better known as the glitch pioneer Oval. St. Werner, Popp, and their collaborators—including, here, Dylan Carlson, of Earth; Kathy Alberici, aka Bocca al Lupo, and a member of the psychedelic doom group Drum Eyes; and Taigen Kawabe, of psychedelic punks Bo Ningen—have also fashioned a radio play out of the same material. Could anything sound more like it required homework?

But knowing much of anything about St. Werner's work in Mouse on Mars is neither help nor hindrance here; Miscontinuum Album is so far from that duo's already enormously varied terrain that the main bullet point on his résumé scarcely bears mentioning. Nor do you need to be familiar with Lithops, the alias for a number of St. Werner's solo electronic releases between 1996 and 2010. Sonically, the shimmering, electroacoustic drones here share more in common with St. Werner's Blaze Colour Burn, from 2013, the first release in his Fiepblatter Series. (This is the third in that series.) Ultimately, though, Miscontinuum Album feels less like a project, or even an album, than a garden or a warren of streets or an abandoned building—something you stumble upon, enter, and explore at your own pace.

Time—or, more accurately, the experience of time—is its primary subject. The musical portions of the album thrum with buzzing synthesizers and naked oscillations—extended passages of unsteady repetitions, rippling loops, and long, held tones that twist like moebius strips. The sound shimmers; heavy on organ-like sounds and trilling electronic frequencies, it scans as a cross between Emeralds and Gastr Del Sol. Several tracks are quite long, running to 12, 16, and even 25 minutes. The music moves like snowmelt in the process of becoming a river, trickling and rushing without obvious shape or direction. The background is awash in voices: pellucid soprano, insectoid chatter, time-stretched shrieks, and the ragged cries of black metal, all blown out into a chalky blur of breath and spittle.

But the album's real center of gravity is to be found in the libretto's five text passages, each between two and three minutes long, read by Earth's Dylan Carlson. The text is plainspoken and prosaic, until it's not; it has the habit of ducking and feinting, hiding behind its own shadow, cloaked in ambiguity. "We hear footsteps above us," says Carlson in the introductory track. "But we're already on the roof. Each now lasts only for a moment. It's all just memory. Holding firm, forget, search for home. Something somewhere, in us, lives on, as—spirit?" These words don't do much on the page, but the way he speaks them makes them come alive—as riddle, or incantation, or blindfolded expressway to yr skull.

Carlson's voice is strangely hypnotic. "How am I not myself?" he asks, early in the piece, describing a continuous tone as a buzz rises in the background behind him and then falls silent. "It cuts to the heart," he continues, his voice at once monotone and strangely tender. "This loneliness after silence. This siren is older than hunger. The loneliness is now electronic. The sound has always been there. It is the undead in me." There is a tiny rustle of noise in the background, and you lean towards the speakers, acutely aware of the act of listening.

Miscontinuum Album is not meant to be background music. It was also not made to be experienced on YouTube or the free version of Spotify, where an ill-timed advertisement would break the music's spell. It doesn't require your full attention, but it tends to capture it. I like to imagine what it would feel like to stumble across the piece on the radio, late at night, perhaps in your car, having no idea what you were hearing, or why—being drawn into its web, confused and intoxicated. After Carlson has finished his monologue, there is a long, enveloping finale, "Amazonas"—25 minutes of shimmer and thrum, hiccup and sigh. It is a sort of psychedelic aftershock to the sober meditations that have come before, and it feels like an answer to a question that Carlson asks in "Scene 2": "Why always the need to explain everything, and from every angle? Everything so endlessly questioned, understood, disassembled, until one wants to do more—but no longer can." To do more, in the context of Miscontinuum Album, is simply to listen. It is more than enough; it is the be-all and end-all.