Denizen of dark ambient, to a point, Ross Hagen is really more of the eulogizer that his moniker bears out. The eulogist not only professes the prodigious effervescence of the subject at hand, but in so doing, he or she also brings about a radical voidance of their own personality and attains to a sort of empty form. This seems most plain in this self-titled work, which de-emphasizes the cohesiveness of the personality and attends to a beautiful semblance, a flexible imagining and stern focus on forms that are worth being combined and those which are not.
A far cry from ambient music for its own sake, then; there’s little of anything here that is pure and functional. From the very beginning everything disdains its own foundations, releases conflicts, disengages powers, ferrets out possibilities. The album is therefore a conservative regulation at the limit of a space of which it is the negation. In their precise ordering of an otherwise unfettered energy, the irregular rhythmic intervals, and heavy, thorough treatments are touched and tantalized with its residues, the skewed cycles, screeching waves, and half-buried, persistent chords becoming morbid delectations of anguish.
The ritual tolling of most pieces defines the loose structure of the spaces as they move through them. There is a detached yet satisfying feel to the progression from temporal lulls, abrupt developmental spurts, and systemic mutations. Pieces like “Concupere” issue from a fragmented landscape of scrapes and whispers, then descend like arcs of luminous rhythm, which – particularly on the aforementioned track, which is quite possibly one of the more arresting pieces in recent memory – feel like speculation on the very birth of light and color itself, and ultimately culminate in a luminous gush of vital forces. Even so, they always fall short of any manner of transcendence and survive owing to a quicksilver lightness of touch that adds a human face to the proceedings, leading them down a hallway of distorting mirrors that finally gives onto an ecstatic blankness.
Max Schaefer
