Will Wiesenfeld loves anime, manga, video games, cartoons—all media with the potential to open up a fantasy world. The Southern California producer often seems to see his music the same way, not least on his 2017 Baths album Romaplasm, a definitive combination of his taste for high fantasy and his gift for gripping romantic and erotic narratives. If that record was like one of the Ghibli or Pixar films Wiesenfeld holds dear to his heart, his releases under the more prolific Geotic name are like hardbound books of concept art, showing the landscapes he’s capable of conjuring before he populates them with his characters. His new Geotic album The Anchorite creates a small and pleasant patch of woods within this universe.
An anchorite is a religious recluse, and accordingly, Wiesenfeld creates an atmosphere of sylvan solitude across these 12 tracks, keeping his vocals to a hushed and wordless murmur at the margins of the music. In the foreground is an omnipresent field of static, which Wiesenfeld uses not to obscure his music so much as to create a rugged and spiky texture; the crackles and pops reach out of the mix like the grasping branches in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Electronics are deployed sparingly, and what few drums Wiesenfeld uses tend to plod like thick workboots through mud. The primary instruments are electric guitar, treated with effects so it sounds a bit like Bibio’s, and piano, which Wiesenfeld sidechains on “The Wood of Corridors” so it seems as if it’s being consumed by an avalanche. It sounds a little bit like folk music, but not quite.
The wood-hewn textures are the most striking thing about The Anchorite, but once it’s over, the melodies are what you’re most likely to remember. Wiesenfeld has a strong pop instinct, and “The Going” and “The Monastic Quiet” are plenty catchy. The music rarely strays far from major keys, and it never hints at much mystery or danger, instead preferring to inhabit a place of certainty and peace—the perspective of the anchorite, perhaps, who has spent a long time here and sees it as a place of refuge, not secrets. Those who like their ambient moodier might find it a tad saccharine, but those on the same wavelength of artists like the Album Leaf, Eluvium, Ulrich Schnauss or Adam Young’s Port Blue project will find more than enough to enjoy.
The Anchorite is most intriguing when it takes us into the more overgrown thickets of Wiesenfeld’s mind. “The Injury” is a lovely backwards guitar sketch that suggests that if ML Buch ever makes a Suntub remix album, Wiesenfeld should be one of the first names she calls up. But even after all the different effects heard across the album, “The Lime of Stars” comes as a shock, erupting into a dense wall of overdrive halfway through, as if Wiesenfeld’s character has suddenly taken a wrong turn into the enchanted woodlands of the black-metal imagination. A few more moments like that might’ve helped The Anchorite feel more expansive, but even at 50 minutes, the album seems finite: a small patch of land with defined borders, sketched lovingly by Wiesenfeld in the margins of the ever-expanding map of his world.
