Each member in the Cleveland trio Emeralds has a distinct persona onstage, or at least they did when I saw them perform at Krakow's Unsound Festival last fall. Steve Hauschildt, standing stock-straight behind a tidy array of electronic gear, looked like an understudy for Kraftwerk, right down to the red shirt. Guitarist Mark McGuire played an emotive rocker, his hair dangling in his face like Thurston Moore, a hint of Jimi Hendrix in his body language. John Elliott was the headbanger: With his back to the audience and his frame bent over a rack of synthesizers, he paced and flipped his mane, pumping his fist in the air to rhythms that often seemed audible only to him.
So it's ironic that Elliott is also responsible for one of the mellowest, gentlest offerings to come from the musicians' extended catalog. It's not hard to connect this self-titled album from his Imaginary Softwoods alias to Emeralds or any of Elliott's other projects, like Mist (with Sam Goldberg) and Outer Space. All 12 tracks are based on synthesizers, sequencers, and sound-sculpting effects, and they nod to a vast realm of ambient electronic music, from Krautrock's "kosmische" contingent to Kevin Drumm and Tim Hecker. But they also sound little like the frenetic burble of Elliott's other work; it's the most measured and contemplative music that I've heard from him.
That outlier status has helped bring the album to the fore in a catalog that's strewn with cassette and CD-R releases, enough to overwhelm all but the most obsessive fan. It was originally released as a triple cassette on Cleveland's Wagon label in 2008; in 2009, Wagon re-issued it in a CD-R edition of 100 and Digitalis snuck out 150 copies on double vinyl. Finally, late last year, Digitalis brought out a more plentiful vinyl edition, remastered by James Plotkin (who also mastered Emeralds' and Oneohtrix Point Never's recent albums for Editions Mego) and cut at Berlin's Dubplates and Mastering Studios.
Two ideas set out the frame of the album: long, shimmering drones that rotate like threaded icicles, and stately melodic pieces almost Baroque in their sensibility. Across 12 tracks, all of them between four-and-a-half and five minutes long, Elliott slides between those two poles almost as though he were moving the crossfader on a mixer. The record opens with a faraway drone that sounds like a wave machine in a wind tunnel; the next track is similar, with a clearer sense of tone and notes that are almost distinguishable as discrete events, but still drowning in the sound of airplanes far overhead. Then, with the third track, we're thrown to the far extreme with a slow, tentative fugue. Instead of the bubbling, chugging maximalism of Emeralds or Outer Space, it makes do with the barest clusters of notes, just one or two at a time, lingering on the woolly nub of colliding overtones.
It's unusually luminous music, with glowing chords and delicate harmonic movement more intuited than heard; in places, it sounds not unlike Kevin Drumm's majestic Imperial Horizon, but with the modulations sped up tenfold, like a filament emitting tiny, uneven pulses of light at a thousand beats per minute. Many of the tracks are versions of one another, sharing sounds and recurring motifs. Tracks five and six are slight variants on the same clusters of chords, with the first filtered to emphasize a basso grumble and the second stripped shiveringly bare; they feel like still-life paintings of a single object whose difference lies mainly in the lighting.
Perhaps most impressive is how subtly Elliott moves from one idea to another. Track eight, the album's center of gravity, begins with a low, hurdy-gurdy drone and blossoms into an all-encompassing shimmer before a regal synthesizer melody slowly rises and escorts us into silence. (It feels almost mythical, like some musical allegory of form assembling itself from chaos.) Drop the needle several times at random, and you might imagine you were hearing bits of three or four different tracks; let it play out from start to finish and it becomes a kind of teleportation machine, dissolving you into a steady, imperceptible ripple of atoms and planting you gently back on the ground, all in under five minutes. It's a hell of a conjuring trick, like a wormhole at the heart of a hall of mirrors.
Whether you listen to it actively or simply as background music, the album has a way of messing with your head, full of sounds you can't decipher and structured in a way that seems to fold back upon itself. As it proceeds, it snakes its way through a succession of spaces that become increasingly difficult to tell apart-- until a new track comes on and you're thrown into an unfamiliar room once again, with dimensions you can't quite make out, but furnished with objects familiar from previous chambers. It's a richly disorienting exercise in déjà vu. It's easy to get lost in these woods-- and tempting to remain there indefinitely.
