Who will lay claim to You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me, the second proper album from Chicago sound art project Wrekmeister Harmonies? During its sole, 38-minute track, the dozen-member ensemble led by J.R. Robinson builds from asymptotic silence into space-age electroacoustic drone, and from browbeating doom metal into, ultimately, a circular, harp-flecked denouement. Within Robinson’s magnetic musical current, the distance from beer-soaked rock club to incense-scented yoga studio is but one quick fadeout.
That notion is backed up by the varied personnel he recruited for this massive instrumental beauty: Jef Whitehead-- better known as Wrest, of U.S. black metal belligerents Leviathan-- adds drums, while seasoned studio musician and distinguished improviser Fred Lonberg-Holm plays cello; there’s viola from Julie Pomerleau, a musician with a wealth of indie rock experience, and electronics from high-tone harsh noise priest Mark Solotroff. It’s an unlikely crew, the sort of experts-in-their-field assembly that you expect to be financed by a major label. Instead, it was simply fostered by the musical diversity of Chicago. But You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me doesn’t fit conveniently into any of its makers’ scenes-- noise or post-rock, metal or classical-- because it falls too far into other scenes into which it doesn’t completely fit, either. Doom or drone, new age or space rock? That barely matters: You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me is a terrific monument of simultaneous stylistic acceptance and avoidance.
Robinson constructed this music as the score for a film of the same name, shot from a rooftop in Long Island City, in the desert of Joshua Tree, and in the urban ruins of Detroit. “It’s a classic example of structural filmmaking, where the camera does all of the work for you,” he recently explained. “There were long, static shots... Nature doing its thing to nature, and nature doing its thing to man.” Such a sense of vulnerability and predictability define this piece, in part because its direction and structure are at once obvious and enthralling-- that is, nearly as soon as it starts, you know exactly where it’s going, but hearing the process itself develop is still captivating.
Here, Wrekmeister Harmonies feels like a stateside, kid-friendly answer to Australia’s the Necks. A gentle bell peal opens You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me, serving as an invocation for the electronic hum and patchwork of phrases and patterns that follow. Upright bass skips along in deep zigs and zags, while shouts and hisses shoot through the space like errant asteroids. A harp traipses. A harmonium howls. A viola weeps. All these sounds grow together for the first 22 minutes or so, gathering eventually into the same great post-rock swell that you might’ve predicted at the track’s beginning. And then it all crashes down, with Whitehead hammering the drums in mid-tempo wrath, evacuating the air beneath distorted guitars and tidal strings and saturating electronics. With the dependability of the setting sun, the beating stops eight minutes later, giving way to an extended trickle back toward silence. Again, the end result, like the middle, is predictable, but the path toward it is both engrossing and wonderful all the same. Wrekmeister Harmonies use familiar elements from Neu! and Neurosis, free jazz and Swans to offer a compass within a sometimes disorienting patchwork of sound. To further facilitate that navigation, Robinson employees a traditional format-- quiet, louder, loudest, quieter-- to let you know where you’re going, just not how you’ll get there.
There’s a temptation to talk about records such as You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me as proof that heavy metal is itself going places, getting smarter and becoming more adventurous. Wrekmeister Harmonies, one could suggest, stands in the midst of some advancing experimental frontier. And, sure, fans of the liminal heaviness of Sunn O))), Earth, Locrian or those that have used volume and riffs to push outside of metal’s confines will likely want to slip inside of Robinson’s protracted rise and fall here. But Robinson’s work feels too personal to be part of any movement, too centered on the intricacies of its own action to be concerned with anyone else’s activities. Its intentionality feels entirely internal, like a deep and calming breath that just happens to be exhaled in the same direction in which the wind is blowing.
