Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow make thick, sticky sounds that flirt with contradiction: Naturalism through technology. Judging from the surplus of overdriven machine noise in which their hippie-folk tunes are mired, you'd think the trees in Pittsburgh came equipped with electrical outlets. They insist on texture over definition, and as a consequence, their albums invariably sound warm, inviting, and homogenous.
With Periphery, the third solo release by a member of the band (Maux Boyle), you begin to suspect that the tendency to favor timbre over songwriting is a function of the band's dynamic, and not the inclination of the individual members. Tobacco's Fucked Up Friends, a largely instrumental hip-hop record released on Anticon, retained BMSR's shaggy atmosphere, but drew it into focus with spirited beats. As the Seven Fields of Aphelion, Boyle strikes a similar bargain between her main group's fetish for analog unpredictability and a more precise method of composition. Working with synthesizer and lightly treated piano, she has produced an album of more comprehensible sounds, which seems plainly indebted to certain Eno collaborations-- with Harold Budd, on the piano-led numbers, and with Robert Fripp on the synth-led ones. There is, however, some pussyfooting.
The sounds here are almost too comprehensible, and at times, deployed too tentatively. Music that treads the ambient/new age line can't stint on mystery, and these tracks, while always very pretty, can feel too obvious to draw us below the surface. On "Slow Subtraction", we hear some reversed synth hums and delayed piano keys-- there's never a "Wow, what am I hearing?" moment. A big challenge for this kind of music is to make soothing sounds we've heard many times interesting. Across this album, mostly stock tricks are deployed: chimes and drones on "Pale Prophecy", detuned wobbles on "Cloud Forest (The Little Owl)", gradually encroaching static on "Saturation: Arrhythmia". These effects feel moderately effective yet entirely familiar.
Even though the building blocks are well-known, Boyle often manages to animate them persuasively and creatively. The bass that sweeps through "Slow Subtraction" has a grand upward shift, and "Grown" gets exciting when spacey synthesizers come corkscrewing out of the piano line. In fact, the record is almost always more attractive when Boyle lets her synths do more than sculpt the background, like on "Mountain Mary" and "Michigan Icarus", where they disrupt the linear slog with a sense of height and freedom. Periphery has all the right moves in place to deliver a pleasurable experience, and it delivers one: I'll certainly break this album out once in awhile. But it's missing an intangible quality-- the depth of Budd/Eno's The Pearl, or the force of Fripp/Eno's Evening Star-- that makes the best ambient music outstrip its scanty means.
