The material that Noveller's Sarah Lipstate has recorded over the last half decade focuses on the power of small gestures. Consisting mostly of drones sourced from solo guitar, her albums rely on deceptively dynamic elements that shift almost imperceptibly, forcing you to engage with each guitar lead, each swooning bass drone. On Fantastic Planet, Lipstate's latest LP, this detail-oriented approach is foregrounded for the first time, allowing the pieces to breathe with a vibrancy that they hadn't been able to attain before. Even from the opening strains of the album's lead track, "Into the Dunes", all of the moving parts spring forth in total clarity. It's a striking moment, given how often over her last couple of records she's been reliant on a sort of swooping sonic muck as her main songwriting tool. Her pitch-warped melodies bubble and coalesce into a creeping latticework of booming bass, twitchy drones, and slurred guitar leads. Each part is given distinct and clear weight within the mix, making the moments when Lipstate unleashes something a little bigger that much more powerful.
Lipstate moves from pointillist detail to hazy heaviness throughout Fantastic Planet, but that contrast is most striking when the sounds she wrings from her Fender Jaguar don't obviously scan as guitar lines. Even since her days playing with the Brooklyn noise-rock experimenters Parts & Labor, she's demonstrated an interest in conjuring atypical sounds from her instrument—early Noveller shows were even played with her guitar laid flat on a keyboard stand—but Fantastic Planet finds her pushing those boundaries more than ever.
On tracks like "Rubicon" and "The Ascent", among others, Lipstate contorts her guitar parts into shimmering bands of sound that recall Oneohtrix Point Never's early synthesizer explorations as often as they do fellow spaced-out six-stringers like Delicate Steve. Since every layer is easy to isolate, this becomes a particularly disorienting tactic; such instrumental confusion forces constant attention and searching through what are otherwise familiar-feeling ambient pieces. The more momentous passages, as on the middle section of "Pulse Point", start to feel a lot stranger when you can't quite pin the source of the sounds down.
This has its drawbacks. As Lipstate so thoroughly focuses her pieces on details and deception, she occasionally loses the forest for the trees. With such focus paid to each individual part, "Sisters" and "Growing" display a tendency to let her fascination with the moving gears trump the narrative movement that marks her best material. But fortunately, such moments are few and far between. Most of these compositions represent a newfound directness for Lipstate, a willingness to present her strange experiments without feeling the need to obfuscate with the labyrinthine compositional exercises or guitar effects she used in the past. Hiding behind all of that was Fantastic Planet, a world just as alien and unsettling as the one depicted in the 1973 film the title alludes to.
