Not quite halfway through Mosaics Within Mosaics, Circulatory System ringleader Will Cullen Hart delivers this cryptic little chestnut: "Funny how long it's been for the young rocks on the shore." Circulatory System—Hart and most of the rest of the much-beloved Olivia Tremor Control, minus the late, great Bill Doss—have always seemed like a band in the loosest sense of the term, touring infrequently and recording sporadically. And frontman Hart's multiple sclerosis—and the attendant bouts of exhaustion—have further affected their output: "I want to write more songs," he told an interviewer last year, "but I get sleepy and go to sleep. It sucks." Mosaics is the first Circulatory System LP in half-a-decade's time, the long-awaited follow up to 2009's Signal Morning. Should current patterns hold, there's a fair chance the next installment won't be hot on its heels.
And Hart and company seem to have designed Mosaics with durability in mind. Mosaics spends an hour sounding like an eternity: it's beautiful, frustrating, full-hearted, foggy-headed, time-distorting, brain-bending stuff, in the grand tradition of the Elephant 6 classics. More than anything, though, Mosaics just feels exceedingly generous; should Hart—for perfectly understandable reasons—only have one Circulatory System record in him every half decade or so, he's gonna make damn sure that record gives you plenty to chew on. The layers upon layers Hart's built into Mosaics Within Mosaics seem designed to withstand the erosion that comes with deep listens. It's possible to imagine that, five years from now, we'll still be digging through Mosaics, turning over the old stones and shaking out the young rocks.
Mosaics Within Mosaics is built atop Hart's home recordings, some dating back a dozen years. Once he did what he could back at the house, Hart farmed out the embellishments and overdubs to the System's inner circle: Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum and Jeremy Barnes, Hether McIntosh of the Instruments, Peter Erchick of Pipes You See Pipes You Don't, Laminated Cat's AJ Griffin, and Dream Boat's John Fernandes. These newly fleshed-out tapes were then turned over to Faster Circuits' Derek Almstead, who helped Hart wrestle the records into their final form. The methods may've changed from the days of communing around the same four-track. But the effect is largely the same. Mosaics Within Mosaics, despite a gentler feel than much of Hart's work, is trademark Elephant 6: ornately constructed with an off-the-cuff feel, an exploration into the mysteries of the universe set to wheezing pump-organs and trilling clarinets.
2009's dense, dizzying Signal Morning was a peculiar animal; listen close enough, and you could practically hear the ghosts of all the records Hart and company had scrapped, or reshaped, or stripped for parts to push the long-gestating Signal Morning out into the world. Those ever-churning fantasias were plenty hooky, but you had to fight through the charred remains of every song-that-wasn't just to get to them. Mosaics, while recognizably a Circulatory System record, takes a different tack: it's cleaner, clearer-sounding, less riddled with maze-like constructions or clotted with endless overdubs. But there's still quite a lot to get your head around here, an ever-shifting patina of march tempos, instrumental outbursts, and the eternally wide-eyed Will Cullen Hart's increasingly wizened lyrics.
Over the years, Hart's grown ever-fonder of symbols and signals, and even the more plainspoken lyrics here feel characteristically cryptic. There are numerous references to a tension between the physical and the mental, the age we're in and the age we feel we belong to. It's tempting to read something about Hart's current condition into these lines, but the life of the mind, the transcendence of the body, and the boundless nature of the soul are longstanding fascinations for him, and for psychedelia in general. That exploration of the point where the innerspace becomes outside blasts is where Hart shines; where so many post-60s psych-rock contents itself with the same old tangerine trees and marmalade skies, Hart—even on what may be the the least capitol-P psychedelic record Hart's ever been involved with—does his best to articulate the combination of confusion and clarity at the heart of the psychedelic experience. Questions beget not answers, but more questions.
Hart and Almstead have taken great pains to give the far-flung Mosaics some structure and cohesion. Compared to the everything-all-the-time feel of Signal Morning, each piece of Mosaics feels like its own discrete entity, every oddball interlude allowed its proper space. Hart's collagist penchant for alternating ponderous fuzz-pop with out-of-nowhere soundbursts is fully intact on Mosaics; there are eight "Mosaics" peppered throughout the set, everything from frazzled static to tinselly little guitar filigrees. The symbiotic back-and-forth between song and sound on Mosaics isn't always a perfect match; many of the songs here seem to stop themselves a bit short, relying on the wriggling interludes that follow to fill in the gaps. But the playing on Mosaics is sumptuous and scrappy alike; Hart's faith in his collaborators, most of whom he's known for multiple decades, is well-earned. Besides, Mosaics is an album's album, less concerned with standout moments than the overall impression given by its curious construction. The effect is very different than the skewed, baroque-leaning pop of their much-loved 2001 debut, or the sonic dogpile of Signal Morning; the quieter, more contemplative Mosaics plays like a series of gentle breezes blowing through an open window, a soundtrack to watching the morning slip slowly into the afternoon.
Opener "Physical Mirage/Visible Magic" finds a wobbly-voiced Hart shakily declaring this a "perfectly normal day", and by the time the utterly gorgeous closer "Elastic Empire Coronation" rolls around, he's in full voice, joined by his friends in a kind of declaration of weirdo solidarity: "If you don't believe us, we can slip on by." There are plenty of wonky, wriggling psych-pop tunes to be found amidst Mosaics' endless refractions: spiny and somewhat somber "Bakery Spires" is an ear-pricker of the highest order, as is "Night Falls", a kind of a doo-wop song sung from a vibrating hotel bed. But there's no "Yesterday's World" here, no head-and-shoulders highlight to be had, which gives Mosaics its feel of constant transformation. It's not a record about individual moments; it's about how those moments play off of each other, balance each other out, continue to delight and disorient. With some big pop blowout to look forward to, each listen feels different, the order seemingly shuffled and the arrangements reconfigured. It's possible to listen to Mosaics 100 times and never quite hear the same record twice.
On early LP highlight "Tiny Planes of Canvas," Hart boasts of an ability to "see the world that no one else can." Hart, operating largely from the confines of his bedroom, has once again created a world unto itself: weird, warm-hearted, endlessly curious, covered in kudzu. The sage, sanguine may not be a kaleidoscopic masterpiece like Circulatory System's debut—or those two eternally brilliant Olivia Tremor Control records—but it's possessed with that same spirit of discovery and wonder. It's a record just as baffling as it is beguiling, a grownass symphony to god, a journey to the center of Hart's expansive mind. No one's making music quite like this, not even the people who helped Hart making this very music, so if we've got another five years to wait for another Circulatory System album, the spiraling mysteries at the center of Mosaics should be more than enough to hold us.
