To ambient fans, Adam Wiltzie is the marquee name in A Winged Victory for the Sullen, simply because he was also in Stars of the Lid. But to everyone else, it would probably be pianist Dustin O’Halloran. He won an Emmy for his Debussy-redolent Transparent theme, which wrings unaccountable amounts of nostalgia, sadness, and hope from a simple waltz. Shaping emotional resonance around other people’s art has been the neoclassical ambient duo’s main pastime since its self-titled debut in 2011. Following scores for film and one for the prominent choreographer Wayne McGregor, The Undivided Five is the second album to showcase what they can do working off of their own images and concepts.
One might expect themes for an imaginary film, but this isn’t film music. It takes too long. Opener “Our Lord Debussy” traverses more than nine minutes at a kingly pace, the piano marching under high-flown regalia of strings and modular synths. There are few extractable moments because everything is interwoven; any time something is resolving, something else is taking shape. The effect is lush and orchestral, with rich bass notes in the piano and intimations of violin solos, but also mystically steeped in ambient music’s eternal present.
Like everyone else since the Guggenheim retrospective, Wiltzie and O’Halloran have apparently fallen under the spell of Hilma af Klint, the proto-abstract painter and theosophist who partly developed her visual language in séances with a group of women called “The Five.” This accounts for the album’s predominance of perfect fifths—which girdle the timbral complexity in rings of harmonic stability—as well as its almost ecstatic, almost painful lyricism.
If it’s not obvious, this is catnip for fans of Max Richter, Tim Hecker, and especially Jóhann Jóhannsson, the duo’s friend and collaborator, who died near the beginning of work on the album. Studio sessions ranged across several countries—Germany, Hungary, Belgium, a grand piano in the Italian woods, overdubs at Ben Frost’s Iceland digs—in search of arcane reverbs and other fine acoustical qualities, which Francesco Donadello’s analog mix gives a supple finish.
Around the time of Jóhannsson’s death, O’Halloran found out he was having his first child, and The Undivided Five trembles on a threshold between sorrow and joy, ending and beginning, life and afterlife. Aching strings emerge like fated events from the everyday seep and curl of passing time. Long minutes pass by dredging up one vast, submerged chord. Each track is its own study in loneliness, yet each is in communication with the others, like spirit mediums.
“Aqualung, Motherfucker” is an endless beginning, with a few purposeful strides trailing off in mid-air again and again. It doesn’t really take flight until the next song, “A Minor Fifth Is Made of Phantoms,” where melancholy fanfare is packed into growling sub-basses that will explode halfway through “Adios, Florida.” It’s a softly shocking climax before the music swiftly resumes its giant-tortoise composure.
Yes, “Aqualung, Motherfucker.” Wiltzie and O’Halloran have a funny habit of impeccably observing the solemn, elevated conventions of ambient music, and then writing song titles that mock elevated solemnity. As their debut offered “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears” and “We Played Some Open Chords,” The Undivided Five sad-trombones itself with “The Haunted Victorian Pencil” and “The Slow Descent Has Begun.”
I’ve never quite figured out how to interpret this incongruity, which I kind of love. Maybe they’re just terrible at song titles? But I think they know what they’re doing. I like to imagine that it’s a reminder to themselves and us not to take all this mortal pomp too seriously, even as they aim to leave no soul unstirred.
Buy: Rough Trade
