There’s a deep incongruity at work in Richard Knox and Frederic D. Oberland’s Rustle of the Stars project, whose title evokes a feathery, utopian ambiance. Inspired by the sonic phenomenon occurring at the Arctic Circle, where a tiny noise is created from the draught of breath on ice crystals, Knox and Oberland’s music is bold and mired in dirt, grit encrusted string passages and grey fields of distortion. This is more Godspeed You! Black Emperor human despair than any Stars of the Lid cosmic drive, striving to get their mud-caked boots to sea level with astral concerns far from their thoughts.
Knox and Oberland set the familiar neo-classical language of strings and lonesome piano figures beside a post rock haze of electric guitar screech, amplifier hum and Tim Hecker-esque distortion. The key to understanding the work is in the producers’ reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s Dream-Land, “the ships trapped or crushed by ice, the point of no-return, the minds sinking, the attempt on the Pole ending in disaster, the quest of the Northwest Passage, Erebus & Terror, the Mercy Bay, Mangazeya, Charles Francis Hall, Beechey Island, the Midnight sun and the Polar night.” The stars look down passively upon their efforts, but like these explorers the human condition, and the cold earth in which we are bound, is all that can be documented.
First piece ‘Sleeping Land (pt 1)’ finds them reluctantly waking, stretching their limbs, depicted by hesitant, sluggish violins. ‘Drawing Lines to the End of the World’ foregrounds a windswept and repeated guitar figure, Sergio Leone in an arctic desert, while ‘The Wreck of Hope’ builds to a hissing crescendo of weeping tones, both sound and title recalling the Constellation roster. The pervading feel is of being not frozen but mired in earth; either way its a cold and hopeless state.
Joshua Meggitt
