When Dylan Carlson’s electric guitar swells from silence to an acute roar at the start of “Gold XIII”, from his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion, the sound induces a sudden shiver, as though a closed window has been unintentionally sprung during the middle of a fierce winter gale. It’s a harrowing tone, a somehow glowing rush of cold that Carlson lets linger. He eventually flicks a few isolated notes over the lonesome drone, letting them fade into the backdrop like ghosts vanishing against the night. When the 30-second instrumental goes almost quiet, Carlson strums a few quick, bright chords, like he’s willed the sun to rise again. It’s a moment of hope that borders on optimistic, but it barely lasts 10 seconds before Carlson shifts to the snarling, aching blues figure of “Gold XIV”.
That’s the general temperament of Gold, which comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail of the 19th century. It’s often been suggested that Carlson’s despondent instrumentals with Earth—both the monolithic early iteration that established drone metal as a genre and the latter-day take known for its blues-crawl refinement—would serve as suitable soundtracks for film renditions of Cormac McCarthy’s books. The westward Klondike trek killed thousands, subjecting the naïve to the abject nature of untamed wilderness and lawless humanity, so Gold is a litany of awful events, where hardscrabble characters endure painful deaths and existential crises, abject loneliness and corrupted dreams. It is, at least, in the McCarthy milieu, finally offering an appropriate cinematic environment for the slow sweep of Carlson’s guitar.
In the movie itself, Carlson’s miniature instrumentals serve mostly as frames, musical borders that guide transitions between scenes and help reinforce moods. But you can trace the same worry, regret, uncertainty and foolhardy aspiration that define the movie through the pieces, too. Together, “Gold III” and “Gold IV” form a brief miasma of self-defeat, each note that Carlson elicits suddenly swallowed by the noisy roar of his amplifier; every picked string is the start of a trip that stands no chance of success.
“Gold XIX,” one of the longer numbers here, staggers along the edge of a slow, angled melody, a precipice rising above a dangerous descent. By track’s end, though, Carlson can barely move through the riff, his motion beset by whorls of noise and the rising wash of Davies’ cymbals. It’s the sound of trouble morphing into terror. The sparkling, if sullen, theme of “Gold XXIII” renders halcyon moments of deliverance. Whether through the release of death or the relief of a stream and clean water, the at-risk adventurers seem to find some relief, maybe even a mirage of it. Carlson lets the end of each phrase float skyward, ascending toward anything else, anywhere but here.
The music on Gold isn’t difficult. The riffs are simple patterns that most anyone with a guitar and a sense of scales could soon pick out. They’re largely unadorned, too, accompanied only by splashes of cymbals and, once, a bass drum from Earth drummer and Carlson savior Adrienne Davies. That might make Gold a hard sell for many. Both the rhythmic grace of recent Earth and the overwhelming volume of early Earth—the band’s central assets for many—are all but absent. But the twist, and the real feat of Gold, comes instead in the guitarist’s simultaneous control and exploration. These are mostly solitary conversations between Carlson, his instrument, his amplifier, and a few effects pedals. Sometimes, it seems, he’s playing pieces of riffs only to hear what they sound like when they decay; at other times, he repeats fragments of melodies in a process of accretion, their repetition building until he can coax feedback from a gently picked purr.
To that end, Gold suggests a crossroads of the dual versions of Earth, where the deliberate melancholy of the latter fuels the amplifier worship of the former, albeit in a much more restrained and reserved space. In their own modest way, these 24 pieces suggest systems music, where the configuration of the guitarist in a room with his guitar and its accessories is more important than the input of what he actually plays. It’s a system with a predisposition for the forlorn, a ghost in the machine that allows these snippets to work onscreen and off.
