From a career standpoint, artists making ambient music don't have it easy. They're usually faceless, like most electronic producers-- we have no idea who is making this stuff. Since subtle understatement is the genre's forte, they're not typically at the cutting edge of technology, either, so the gear geeks inevitably move on to something else. And then there's the problem of how the music changes once a template is established. It's a fantastic and rare thing to create your own voice in electronic music, but once it happens, you're confronted with where to go next. No matter how appealing or distinctive your sound, it's unlikely that most people will need four or five albums of it.
And that's where I'm finding Scott Morgan's Loscil project here on his fourth album. It's not that he keeps making the exact same record over again. There are changes. Sometimes he makes the heartbeat 4/4 kick a priority; other times he focuses more on glitches. Sometimes his music sounds bubblier, more aquatic, or more organic; traditional instruments have cameos. But despite the variance, the general character and prevailing mood of his four albums is virtually identical. Were a listener looking for a calm, textured, emotionally neutral space to stumble upon any one of them, including Plume, I'm sure they wouldn't be disappointed. If you know his first three records well, on the other hand, you might find this one redundant.
Let's talk about the differences. Morgan looks back a bit further on this record, giving Plume a clear "classic ambient" sound. By using spare bits of guitar and piano, he evokes the 1970s world of ambient pioneers like Eno, Cluster, and Tangerine Dream. "Chinook" and "Bellows" in particular sound like the Reich-channeling trance music Tangerine Dream brought to soundtracks in the late 1970s and early 80s-- most famously for Risky Business-- and it does so rather nicely. Throughout, Plume is much less diffuse with lighter processing. Morgan seems content to let the synths go it alone on droney tracks like "Zephyr" and "Motoc", inserting just the smallest bits of static-ridden glitch to send ripples across the placid surface. Plume sounds older and more spacious than any of the earlier Loscil material.
Which all adds up to...I'm not sure, exactly. Plume is certainly a nice-enough record, but it also seems like the kind of music Morgan could do well until the end of time. There's no sense of challenge or risk, no feeling that this project wants to step outside what it already knows. Not a terrible thing, but also not a quality that invites close attention as new material piles up. One of the tracks, appropriately enough, is titled "Rorschach". You'll hear what you want to hear in these blobs of sound, and the specific place you're coming from will make all the difference.
