After years of crafting wispy, yet tempestuous ambient records, the Virginia trio Labradford halted activity after 2001's fixed::context. In the intervening years, the band's members have been involved with similarly groaning and lurching post-rock side projects, but even guitarist Mark Nelson's notable Pan American hasn't quite filled the gap that the trio's grandiose records left behind. Now, for the first time in thirteen years*,* Nelson and bassist Robert Donne are back together as Anjou. Their self-titled debut holds up to the doomy strains of their pioneering act's best work and defies direct comparison thanks to the clattering efforts of virtuoso drummer Steven Hess.
Like later Labradford efforts, Anjou's sonic bedrock largely consists of wavering ribbons of syrupy synth pads. But where Nelson's earlier records used distended drones in service of songs, Anjou aims for something far more alien. "Sighting", for example, relies on little more than the glacial ooze of several slowly keyboard lines to craft a landscape far more foreign than even Labradford's latent Popol Vuh tendencies; it's full of slow, aquatic groans that place it outside the contemporary boundaries of what a Kranky-signed act often sounds like. Though "Specimen Question" is built around snowcapped synth waves that wouldn't sound out of place on a Tim Hecker record, and "Inclosed" features the sort of jittery noise that's come to define the recent output of Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie. Each track appends twitchy, garbled digital manipulations to the component synthesizer parts, crafting a thoroughly unhinged take on the the typically soporific strains of ambient music.
Hess, who's previously worked with Locrian and Fennesz, helps set Anjou further apart from their contemporaries. Just as the record seems content to lapse entirely into somnambulant keyboard exercises, Hess's distorted percussion scurries into the mix; on "Sighting", the glossy synth drones give way to an anxious clatter that evokes Four Tet's abstract drum programming, and the distant digital gridworks of "Backsight" call to mind the amorphous throb that Boards of Canada often employ to terrifying effect. Despite how often his jittery concussive rattles make their way into the record, each instance remains uniquely volatile and otherworldly.
Throughout their careers, Nelson and Donne have always been cautious of overcrowding their frigid compositions, at the occasional risk of landing on the wrong side of the line between meditative and monotonous. On the whole, Anjou is similarly thrifty and minimal in its instrumental and tonal choices, but with the addition of Hess' floor tom fire bombs and delirious, kaleidoscopic noise bursts, the new duo have given drive and purpose to their often opiated work.
