At various points during Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity, it becomes difficult to tell what Wolf Eyes founder Nate Young is doing, or how he gets the seemingly alien sounds that shape his first proper solo album in six years. What are those robotic rhythms of “The Weeping Babe” or the liquid ripples of noise that drip between the beats? Is that actually a pedal steel wrapped around the scattered piano chords of “Vents of Blue,” or is it only a sculpted ray of feedback? The textures on these nine tracks are uniformly familiar and strange, just skirting the rules and roles you might expect, as if you’re taking a long walk through a world where the rules of gravity occasionally start to bend.
This is not a new sensation for the music of Young, who has been turning traditional instruments like his voice and guitar inside-out for two decades with Wolf Eyes. “When I first started playing music, I started with a guitar, and someone stepped on it so that was over,” he quipped to FACT in 2013. “So I started looking around for whatever else I could play.” On Dilemmas, those “whatever elses” are modular synthesizers and a panoply of homemade chimeras—distortion units appended to discarded tape decks, triggered hammers that tap frame drums and metal pipes, circuit-bent orbs of unknown provenance. There is some guitar, as with the strangled solo that twists and juts and claws around the beat of “Dribbling Insane.” But even that strikes as exotic, the contrast highlighting the surreal nature of most everything else here.
These nine pieces hover in their own worlds for four or five minutes at a time, establishing both a mode and mood in their first few seconds and then lingering there, as if breathing the air Young has made. This is intentionally framed incidental music, snippets of would-be scores fleshed out into fascinating little songs. “Crumpled Body” stares into the distance and ponders the void, curves of noise rising repeatedly through a torpid industrial beat only to vanish and begin again. “In the Shadow Of” exists as an endlessly cyclical sunrise, with fluorescent tones peeking over horizons of organ haze and receding as if they were never there at all. On the gorgeous and wistful “Vents of Blue,” piano chords and pedal steel function as the conjoined ends of an ouroboros, one sound always passing through the other. It reflects the sensation of staring at stacks of old family photos and feeling lost forever in the reverie.
Young has hinted at that kind of slow-motion diligence before on his solo records, inward turns from the triumphant paroxysm and managed chaos of Wolf Eyes. But where 2013’s Blinding Confusion seemed to kowtow to Young’s reputation for harsh sounds and sinister moods, Dilemmas is guileless and honest. He sorts through confusion, sadness, anxiety, and urgency with instrumental candor. These songs feel like private meditations on themes, his emotions articulated through methodical exploration of the instruments at hand. In that way, they recall the mid-1960s Takoma landmarks of guitarist John Fahey or the sparkling wonder of computer music innovator Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 debut, The Expanding Universe. Nothing on Dilemmas lands like a high or a low; on the album and within each track, there’s no clear climax or dénouement. These are pure states of being, subtly evolving testaments to the continuing evolution of a true architect of the modern avant-garde.
